Episode #106 America's Great Advanced Lost Civilization - the Earthworks Complexes
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This is Cosmographia, the Randall Carlson Podcast. ♪

And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is Cosmographia, the Randall Carlson podcast. We got everybody in their various studios here and normal guy Mike in the NSA control center over there.

How you doing, Mike? The guys behind me say hello. Yeah. Command Central. Keep an eye on us. They say hello to us every day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But for this occasion, yeah, Mike asked while we're recording if everybody could just sit really still. That's right. And they were cool with that. Keep it down back there. Yeah.

So I think this evening we're going to get into some mound stuff, right, Randall? We're going to talk about the mound culture, some of the sites. Yeah. Hey, what a great idea. Yeah? Yeah. I just came up with that just now. Round and round. Yeah. Yeah, man. That's what we're going to do. Yeah, we're kind of thinking along parallel lines. And speaking of parallel lines, yeah, one of the reasons, one of the things we'll look at is parallel lines.

Hmm. Parallel lines. You know what barrows are? Long barrows? They call them long barrows in British, in England, but they're the same thing here. We'll look at some of those. That's where we got two mounds, elongated mounds running parallel to each other. And there was a lot of that.

A lot of it, as we'll discover here. Like it has a low space between them? Yeah, like imagine you've got two raised embankments. Artificial canyon. Yeah, but typically, we'll take a quick look at the... What did Brad say? Reverse cart ruts. Well, in a way, kind of in a way, yeah. Well, uh...

I know everybody here is familiar with Serpent Mound. I think we've all been there, right? Yes. Do we know about Normal Guy? The mounds? Serpent Mound. You ever been to Serpent Mound? I have not been to Serpent Mound. I was with you when we went to the Cahokia Mounds in Missouri. You were there?

I'm sorry, that was Brad. Yeah, we went by there on the way out to Washington 10 years ago. That was impressive. I had never seen that before. I was truly impressed by that sight. Yeah, well, so was I. I still continue to be impressed. And then you get even more impressed.

When you start thinking about, it's enough to, when you're thinking about one individual structure, but then when you realize the scale and scope of the whole phenomena, it's almost unbelievable in its own way. I mean, it's...

And yeah, so that's one of the things is, you know, most people immediately, especially if you're in America and you start thinking about ancient ruins and stuff, you start thinking about Egypt and Greece and Babylonia. You might think of Central America, but you're thinking about all these other places forgetting or not having realized in the first place that right here in America, we have remnants of tons of stuff that are on such a vast and awesome scale that it's really almost hard to wrap your head around.

You know, and the other thing that struck me is that we've got – there are plenty of reconstructed villages, I think, in Creek Indian and Cherokee Creek, Muskogee Indian. Creek, yeah, Creek. Around the south, you know, and you begin to realize they had cities. They had villages that were, you know, good size and well organized. They were not –

You know, they weren't the stereotypical villages we see in the tent cities and the teepees that you see in the Plains Indians. These were cities with networks and roads between them. Networks of trade that were far-flung. Yeah. Even, you know, trade with, so the eastern woodlands were trading with Central America. Now think about that. That's, you know, and now I haven't looked into it to a,

particularly in depth, but the amount of trade that was going on between Central, say, and South America. And there was trade going on. We know that there was some kind of cultural context. But, you know, I wonder and think about how extensive was the network of cultural interconnections, let's say, between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. I think we're finding out that it's a lot more extensive than was even pictured a few decades ago.

And these people were up to things that were still just at the very beginning of figuring out. And the copper up in Michigan found its way long distances, didn't it? Yes, exactly. That's a good example. That's a great example. You know, I did visit one of those copper mines back in 97, and it was quite interesting. It was when we were up there, we were shooting for fire from the sky.

And we had gone up to Peshtigo, and that was when I visited the Peshtigo Museum, and we interviewed Robert, forget his last name. He was the curator of the museum. But near there was a big, the remnants of a huge copper mine. I don't remember exactly where I could find it again. I mean, this was 96, actually, I think.

When I went there. But yeah, it was interesting to see. Then I think there were other copper mines in Michigan, right? Wasn't that where a lot of those copper mines are? Yeah. Right. Have you guys looked into those at all? And the sheer volume of copper that has been... Yes, we have. It was a lot of copper was moved out of there. They found lots and lots of hammers,

pools as well. No one is clear on where the copper went or who the people were because they weren't living there. No bodies, right? Like no settlements. It was like a seasonal thing and they just, they came, they mined and then they left. Now, do you remember the dating? I mean, if my memory serves me correct, this was actually over a fairly long span of time that this was being mined. Some of these sites.

But I wonder when the latest dating was. The youngest, before they were finally the whole... I can look it up real quick, see if I can find it. That would be interesting. It was old. I mean, it's not really explained who it was or where it went. Some people think it may have fueled the Bronze Age.

uh you know across the ocean but then that would imply transatlantic trade at a time when there wasn't supposed to be impossible yeah yeah so we can just not even think about that one more nanosecond because it's impossible it's impossible no no further consideration yeah we know that there are certain things impossible and you know why we know that

Because we are part of this elite cadre that has a monopoly on reality. Yeah. My theory is that the people who mined that copper are the ant people. It makes sense. Because the people that wrote or talked about the ant people or have these legends of the ant people, what better people to call the ant people than the guys coming in and out of the ground and having trails all the way to the sea?

So, okay. Okay. So this is from nps.gov, so you know it's totally official. 100% correct. National Park Service. I guess that mines are now part of a park. We can stake our lives on the complete and 100% truthfulness and accuracy of this, right? 7,000 years ago. 7,000. Is when it started, they estimate. Wow. Wow.

So that sounds familiar now. Interesting. So during the early, well, that would be, yeah, that's kind of in that transition between what you would say early and mid-Holocene, but it was definitely still during... 5000 BC, right? 5000 BC, and you're still in the climatic optimum. So then are they speculating how long the quarrying operations lasted?

Uh, the next entry in their timeline is 1771. So no, but, uh, the first thing on this page is really interesting. A partial serpent artifact made of Lake Superior copper, which was found at the effigy mounds national monument in Iowa. Oh, I can't really show this to you, but there's this beautiful, see that I could barely make, if you could put it closer, let me see if I can.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see it now. There's no autofocus on that camera. It doesn't focus. I turned it off. Okay. Well. So, yeah, then they start with 1771 when Alexander Henry makes the first English attempt to mine the copper and then goes on from there. But they found, you know, tools and lots of remnants of the previous people. Oh, speaking of previous people. And people.

But before we get away from it, let's talk for just a second about this whole ant people thing. So ever since I read those Hopi accounts, I go in my head, okay, now, ant people, I'm not envisioning, like, giant hybrid hominid ants walking around, that they look like ants. I'm thinking that, obviously, that they're people who are living underground, right?

Right? I mean, okay, so then when we get away from the mythic aspect of it, we acknowledge that there are realities behind the myths. Then it really comes down to like, okay, if we accept that there were real people that gave rise to this image of the ant people that found its way into Hopi mythology, who were they? Who were they? So there's some...

some historical reality behind it. There's a whole, in other words, here we say ant people. What do we know about them? Virtually nothing. But you've got to realize that there's undoubtedly a whole gigantic, profound story behind that. Yeah, on our show, we've talked about it multiple times, and Kyle made the great point that if you see a mining operation from a distance...

It's a bunch of people and equipment going in and out of a hole in the ground and making a long line as they bring materials in and out. And they look like ants. So if you were some other culture and you came along and you were like, well, they're the ant people. It's the people that have come here and digging holes in the ground and carrying stuff out. They look like ants. That could be the source of something like that. Could be as simple as that. The source could be as simple as that. Now, then my question would be, were they digging holes or were they utilizing natural caves?

Yeah. I don't know. But see, that gets into the story. And I've just for years been curious about, well, who the hell were those people actually? Yeah. We know a lot about the Hopi. But through the Hopi, we know that there was this group, some cultural group, called the Ant People, that by affiliating, allying with the Ant People, they were saved from a tremendous catastrophe.

Didn't they say that they emerged after the catastrophe from the ant people's place below ground somewhere in the Grand Canyon area? Well, probably so. Yeah. So somewhere there is an entrance. Well, what we need to do. Okay. Well, I'm picturing. Okay. So, you know, there's a mailbox there, you know, an old mailbox there somewhere down on the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Yeah. People.

And then somewhere there'll be a door. A hobbit door. It's going to be a hobbit door. That's exactly what I was envisioning, precisely. Hello? Hello? And there's plenty of...

strange stories of people finding stuff in in or around the near the grand canyon too so who knows i'm not familiar with a lot of those have you looked into those i mean i mean they're just a lot of it yes it reads like sensational strangeness but ah okay and who know you know some things are sensational strangeness that's the thing in fact yeah i think that perhaps all of existence

It could be classified that way. Sensational strangeness. Yeah, you're right. The universe itself is extremely unlikely. Yeah. If we were going to write a history of the universe, what is it again? Sensational strangeness. Sensational strangeness. I think that about captures the mood there. Right.

But speaking of sensational strangeness. That reminds me, we tried to think of something that was dangling a couple weeks ago, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was what I was looking for was lurking variable. Dangling variable. No, dangling wasn't the dangling.

Participle. Participle. Participle. And a lurking variable. I think we should just, it should be the lurking participle and the dangling variable.

Well, I don't remember the context. Made me think of that, yeah. That's Mike on our show. Mike is the lurking variable. The lurking variable. That's right. Well, I wasn't going to – I was thinking that, but I wasn't going to go there. Point fingers.

Well, I think I was trying to make the post. Now, listen, you guys can laugh all you want, but I was trying to make a serious point. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. About the lurking variable, but we got sidetracked into dangling whatever it was. And so I was never able to make my serious point, which now I've completely forgotten what it was.

No, actually, it was this. I mean, the lurking variable is that variable. It's like hanging out over, you know, kind of in the corner of the room in the shadows. You don't even normally notice that he's there or it's there.

But at the last minute, when you think you've got it all figured out, he steps out of the shadow and you realize, no, you've completely misconstrued everything. And, you know, the janitor didn't kill the butler, didn't kill the guy. You know, the lurking variable is the thing that can step in and change the whole equation, turn it upside down or whatever. So there was something in that regard that we were talking about that potentially...

was in that role. I don't remember what it was, but that's an important role. And if you look at history, you can actually see that there are times when those unforeseen things kind of sitting right off the radar screen in the sidelines suddenly come into the merge into the picture and everything. It's a major like plot upheaval. It just turns everything upside down, rearranges it, and then you got to rethink it all. So, yeah.

So with that having been said, yeah, yeah, I think that, yeah, probably Mike is the lurking variable. And one of these days, one of these days, he's going to come with something that upsets everything that we've been putting together and talking about for the last three years. So, you know, the best example right now that I can think of is...

The work that's being done on these ancient Egyptian vases that they've been sitting there in museums. Yes. Perfect. For hundreds of years. Yep. The precision is only now being measured. And now suddenly, bam, here it is, the evidence. And it's going to change everything about how you must view ancient civilization. That is a great example. Perfect example right there.

It exemplifies the concept, we could say. Yeah. Uh-huh. And, yeah, and it's great that Ben Van Kirkwick has been kind of in the forefront of getting that out. Yeah. That's great. So, yeah, talking about – I don't even know where to start here, really. There's so much.

One of the books I read. Parallel Lines. Parallel Lines, yeah. Well, those are the ways, the graded ways, and we'll get to that. But one of the books that I read maybe 20 years ago, I don't remember the date on it. You could probably look this up. By Roger G. Kennedy called The Hidden Cities, The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization.

The title, the subtitle, Hidden Cities. Well, because it's hidden, you know, just like, you know, it's the remnants of this are hidden everywhere about us. But in a sense, they've been lost. They were discovered. And that discovery was documented in things like Squire and Davis.

You know that in the early 1800s when Squire and Davis were doing their surveys, at that point, most of the earthwork architecture was still intact. Well, 100 years later, 85 to 90% of it was gone. 1996 is the publication date. Okay, 1996. Okay, so...

Yeah, in the preface to the book, I think it was in the preface, he made a comment that I think is really apropos here. He says, after he'd been studying it for some time and doing the research for the book, he says, the person, this is kind of how he concluded, the person who does not wonder at this will not wonder at anything. And I found it, you know, I mean, there's a lot of literature. When you go back to the

19th century, there is a really interesting corpus of literature about the mounds. And I think we've gotten into a little bit of that, haven't we, when we've talked about some of the excavations of the mounds that disclosed the remnants of very large humans? We have not talked about that on this show. Not on this show. You have talked about it before, and we have talked about it on our show, but not much on this show.

Well, there's definitely a connection between the monumental earthwork architecture of pre-Columbian America and this whole giant phenomenon. Lay it on me. Yes, sir. I want to hear it. Well, let's see. So here, Native Americans before 1492 by Linda Noreen Schaffer. Now, I have this here. I don't know if I necessarily agree with her argument,

all of her conclusions in this paper, but nonetheless, he kind of puts a nice little capsule around it. She says, only 200 years ago, in the woodlands of eastern North America, there were tens of thousands, tens of thousands of large earthen mounds, all of which had been built by Native Americans.

Which I think is true to an extent, but I think that's kind of one of the questions we need to ask in terms, in reference to the origins, the incentives, the motivations. And as you begin to wrap our heads around the scale and monumentality of this phenomenon, I think it's imperative that we go, wait a second.

What was behind this? You know, why would people over thousands and thousands of square miles who are essentially categorized as foragers, foragers, why would people whose economy was based on foraging undertake this monumental, epic,

enterprise of creating these earthworks? Well, it's the same question, isn't it, that we're asking about probably a dozen other locations around the world?

So she says, only 200 years ago in the woodlands of eastern North America, there were tens of thousands of large earthen mounds, all of which had been built by Native Americans. They were impressive structures. Visitors who saw them were amazed by the size of many, by their number, and the intricacy of their design. Yet the significance of these earthworks, indeed their very existence,

is one of the best-kept secrets of American history, which takes us back to the subtitle of Roger Kennedy's book when he says, well, yeah, Hidden Cities, The Discovery and Loss.

of ancient North American civilization. How many students, you know, in grade school, they certainly never told me about it. I never learned about Indian mounds coming up in any of my education. You know, we had the history of Minnesota. I don't think the history of Minnesota that we had when I was in sixth grade ever covered any of that. It started, of course, when did the French first come up to Mississippi? You know, that kind of thing.

That's where the history began. And of course, now it may have changed since I was in sixth grade back in 1963. Right. But that's the idea. I mean, who's been taught about this? And yet it's so ubiquitous and so vast that it shows that there is this completely lost history.

Of the West, particularly of North America, there is a lost history. And I would think that the concentration of these early, the early stuff, which started between five and seven thousand years ago, when we first begin to see evidence of the large scale modification of the landscape.

Well, one of the things would be post-Younger Dryas, we've definitely talked on this show about the potential population bottleneck that may have resulted out of the Younger Dryas. The abandonment of quarries, of campsites, the apparent absence of large numbers of people.

Right. We've talked about that. So where are the remains of these people? Even early Holocene, where are the remains? Well, we know there were burials. But when we start looking at the scale of this, the earthwork phenomena, it seems like we're talking one hell of a gigantic labor pool of people. You know, like Mike was saying, which we get into it, you know, I mean, there were urban areas that were.

You know, Cahokia, that was a huge urban area. I think there was like 50,000 estimate based on the extent of the infrastructure. I think I've seen the estimates of up to 50,000 people living there. But that's just one location. Right.

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If you think you might be struggling with OCD, visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15-minute call and learn more. That's nocd.com. When we start talking about the earthwork architecture of North America, primarily America, and I think it's indicative that all of the—no, no, not all, but most of the

Like east of the Mississippi or in the Mississippi Valley, most of the earthworks we see were in the non-glaciated areas. Like when you get up to Ohio and you start visiting those, you know, the earthworks up there, you're going to be south of the margin of the lobe that was there, right? We can actually see, I have a slide, I may have it here where I can pull it up, where I plotted the earthworks slides, and you can see them.

Right. With respect to the terminal moraines.

And there's a whole set of recessional moorings in Ohio that are very conspicuous in a digital elevation map, where you can see that there was a major withdrawal of the ice, a pause, built long enough to build a terminal mooring, then another rapid recession, a pause, and then south of there is where you begin to see, you can begin to map the earthwork structures.

But here were some of the design elements when we talked about, you know, we say mounds, and that's the first thing that kind of comes into people's minds. But we have plazas. We'll see example of a tremendous plaza that was at Poverty Point in Louisiana. Plaza, causeways. Now, the thing that we were looking at,

earlier before the show, Kyle, in the Squire and Davis book there, the Piked and Graded Way, that is an example of a causeway. We also had canals and moats that were an integral part of the design elements, truncated pyramids that could be rectilinear or could be cones.

And in fact, some of the cones weren't even, I don't think, fully truncated, only partially truncated. The problem is that, you know, millennia of erosion has sometimes made it hard to determine whether there was actually a flat surface on some of the conical mounds or not. But then you had a variety of different kinds of enclosures, such as ringed, a ringed, right, round, rectilinear.

polygonal, or composite. And we're going to see like Newark is a beautiful example, a very impressive example of a composite where you've got rectilinear and you've got ringed.

part of the same complex and you have causeways and you have plazas okay and then finally the elevated or the graded way okay so actually i think the the example what would happen the elevated or graded way now that particular feature that you saw and do you have the book handy there um is it still i do still open to that page i'll pull up a slide here in a minute but you might hold up the book this is anybody interested in

So delving further into this phenomena, this is the book right here. Now, there's lots of others and we can recommend them, but this is the this I think was first published in the 1830s. So this would have been the what do you call it? A hundred and fifty year anniversary. It was reprinted.

Yeah, and it's got these beautiful plates and diagrams. Squire and Davis spent years and years surveying all of the extant mound structures and the complex in there, and this is just an invaluable document. What's the date on that? Yeah, it is. It's a great book. I spent many hours just, and we've used that. Bradley and I have actually used that book when we've done some of our mound exploration up in Ohio.

Seems like it was 1859 or something, but yeah, well, it was 250 years. It would have been 2009. 1821 to 1888. Okay. Oh, wait, is that Library of Congress cataloging in publication data? Yeah, was there a first publication date? But you said... I don't think it attributed to Smithsonian or one of the history museums, like their first publication. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I'm not sure.

Yeah, okay. Well, it's not... Those dates are not critically important, other than they did... There's a whole bunch of dates here. I can't tell what's what. So they did a reissue, and this has got to have been... This is the 150th anniversary. Yes, 150th anniversary. So do we have the date when the reissue occurred? I'm looking up the original now. It's not...

that critical really but so those are the elements that you should learn that learn the the nomenclature for and we'll work through so we can see examples of what each of those were so plazas causeways you know like there's a causeway that connects the pyramid of kefrin to the sphinx right they call that a causeway so similar very similar we have canals and boats

a lot of them which are now dry but at one point held water, truncated pyramids and cones, four types of enclosures, ringed, rectilinear, polygonal, and composite. 1848 is when it was first published. Oh, 1848. By the Smithsonian. 1848. Okay, so we're going to add 150. Okay, so 1998 is when that reissue would have come out.

But I'm sure it's still in print for anybody who wants to do research. So here is a quote from Renaud Chateaubriand in his Memoirs of Travels, The Voyages to America in 1791. It was published in 1826. This is Voyage to America. Voyages, plural, to America. The works of which I speak.

are found at the mouth of the Big Miami. Now, these are all tributaries to the Ohio River. At the mouth of the Big Miami, at the mouth of the Muskingum, at Tomb Creek, and on one of the branches of the Scioto. Those which border this river occupy the space of two hours' march as one descends towards the Ohio. So, in other words, he's walking for two hours, and he's in amongst these people.

complex of mounds. In Kentucky, along the Tennessee and in the Seminole country, you cannot take a step without seeing some vestiges of these monuments. And this is from Richard C. Taylor Esquire. This appeared in one of the very early, this American Journal of Science was perhaps, if not the first, one of the very first science journals published in America.

So this is a paper written by Richard C. Taylor Esquire, published in the American Journal of Science in 1838. It's entitled, Notes Respecting Certain Indian Mounds and Earthworks in the Form of Animal Effigies, Chiefly in the Wisconsin Territory, which now I should add that to my list of design elements. Although...

The animal effigies, a lot of times, there are many animal effigies, and there is some integration between the typical monumental earthworks and the animal effigies. Like we have animal effigies right here in Georgia. There is Rock Eagle, which is a big, it's like done out of boulders, and they've got a viewing tower. You climb up the viewing tower so you can look down, because when you're underground,

It looks like a bunch of big rocks. You don't really get the picture. But when you're above looking down on the thing, then you can see that it's a winged bird. So, yeah, there are scattered animal effigies all around. But there seems to be this concentration of them up there in the Midwest, particularly in Wisconsin. So this is now from notes respecting certain Indian mounds and earthworks in the form of animal effigies, chiefly in the Wisconsin Territory.

And he's talking about somebody he was interviewing named Mr. Bringer, or Bringer, Bringer, doesn't matter. Mr. Bringer, describing the Indian mounds in the region of the Mississippi, states that from Red River to St. Louis, a distance of 500 miles, and in the breadth, 80 to 200 miles, mounds constantly occur.

and for the most part are symmetrically arranged, mounds in such abundance that the traveler is never out of sight of them. What an immense population, he observes, must have occupied these dwellings, which cover so large a portion of the surface of this region. Let's see, so this is part of the annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute,

Published in 1877 by James Shaw. It's entitled The Mound Builders in the Rock River Valley, Illinois. That part of the state of Illinois called the Rock River Country is in many respects one of the most interesting portions of the great Northwest. The early settlers and explorers found this valley thickly peopled with Indian tribes who regarded it as a favorite hunting and fishing ground.

There is also abundant evidence that this rock river country was densely peopled by the mound builders. They have left their remains everywhere, on all of its most beautiful spots. Stone implements, copper weapons and ornaments, and the remains of their plastic art are also frequently found.

Nothing like the great field works, fortifications, and sacred enclosures of Ohio or such as are found at Astollan in Wisconsin exist so far as known on or near the shores of Southern Rock River. But the oblong and common round mounds, some of them of very large size, may be counted by the thousands."

The upper valley of Rock River very much resembles the lower. The mound builders swarmed over them all. So then, jumping forward to more modern times, this was from a book called Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley by Susan L. Woodward and Jerry N. McDonald, published in 2001.

The Adena, that's one of the names given to the people who are the presumed mound builders, right? The Adena and the Ohio Hopewell were the premier builders of distinctive and sometimes truly impressive mounds, geometric earthworks, and hilltop enclosures within the Middle Ohio Valley. Taken as a whole, the prehistoric mounds and earthworks of the Middle Ohio Valley are masterpieces.

Their number, size, precision, and grace, and the magnitude of the organizational and managerial effort that was marshaled to build them, require that these architectural monuments be ranked among the important prehistoric engineering and artistic accomplishments of mankind. So, now I'm going to do a share screen. I think this will be of interest.

And get my navigation going here. Share screen. Let's see. We'll do screen three. So here you will get to see on this digital elevation model some of the areas we're talking about. Now check this out. The Erie lobe from Lake Erie. Look at these terminal moraines, guys. Actually, recessional moraines. You see that?

Yeah. That's impressive right here. Yes. Sorry, I was working my mouse over the wrong monitor. Yeah. So you can see that right from this that the recession was not a smooth continuous, but it was...

It was rapid for a while, and then it stabilized for a while. And you'll note, of course, that these are recessional moraines because, and so from oldest to the youngest, you'd be going north, right? Does that make sense? Yes. So the youngest recessional moraine is this one up here at the top. But you can actually see there's remnants of a moraine right here as well. Yep.

It looks like it's been probably washed away right here. So you probably had meltwater flows coming down here. Of course, then they would have also washed these away. But in any case, what you saw was that you had a rapid recession. Then you had an interruption of the recession long enough to build water.

a mooring, and then another recession, and then another recession. So what I was getting at is if you look at this area down here that's quite heavily dissected by erosional valleys and things, it's all within this area in these rivers and valleys here that the mounds are so thickly clustered. In fact, let me see. Ah, there we go. Look at this. So I'm going to roll here, and we'll see some of the very ones we were just talking about.

and how they are built within and amongst these valleys and erosional features that clearly were connected with the melting back of the ice sheets. So you've got, yeah, the Ohio River. You look right here. Here's the Ohio River, right? So is that – do you think that's symbolic somehow? I don't know. Like we know that, you know, these cultures would carry these –

for a long time. So is it possible that these had some kind of symbolism to this great destruction that they remembered through their stories? I would think that's certainly plausible. I can't say that I am. I would just point out that the I was just reading recently about a site that's under Lake Huron.

These lakes were way, I guess they were way shallower 9,000 years ago, 100 feet or so. Yeah, so they were much bigger for a while during the melting, and then once most of the melting sources were gone, then you had this period, yeah, like you said, around 9,000, maybe 8,000 years ago, they were shallower.

Yeah, and I think there's actually like a rumored hinge-type monument on the floor of Lake Michigan. You familiar with that? I did. I just actually recently looked into this quite a bit, and it's in Lake Huron. But there is one there, too. I looked this up. But is it a stone circle? Because the idea that there was an actual like a hinge is not correct. Yeah.

From what I understand, they're... Ah, I'm maybe not up to date on the latest. I think, yeah. I don't know. I don't know if this is accurate, but... I looked for it, because I found the same thing, that there's like a Stonehenge under there, and I tried to find it, but what I instead found was that they were diving on this place in Lake Huron that was... Well, okay, so now you guys, I think you can anticipate what I'm now thinking, right?

What are you thinking? Well, I'm thinking, okay, you guys, now that you're becoming certified deep water divers. Oh, yes, of course. Yes, we want to dive on this. Yeah, absolutely. This is exactly what we've been talking about. We're going to need deep water and dry suit. We have to take more courses to do that. Oh, okay. How deep are we talking about here? It was like 100 and something feet. 100 and something feet, and it's very, very cold. 120 feet. Yeah.

So, yeah, we're going to need to do, you know, deep water, which is like a different kind of gas mixture. Okay. And then dry suits. The place I'm talking about is called the Drop 45 Drive Lane. Yeah. And it's basically a drive lane for the caribou.

So there was a ridge that was exposed 9,000 years ago because the water was 100 and something feet lower. Yeah, yeah, okay. And they would drive the caribou along this ridge and they had basically cleared the ridge down to the bedrock. I don't know if they did that work, but it's cleared down to the bedrock. And then they had built these walls out of stone.

to and to drive the caribou along and narrower and narrower oh yeah they had hunting blinds built along it out of stone that they would hide in and it's pretty now this is this is 9 000 years ago 9 000 years ago 100 so post yeah post younger dryas yeah and caribou though were that far south i guess i didn't question it you know okay i should question that but

They found bones and stuff too. Uh-huh. So if you go back to the slide that we're still looking at here, I've done a little crude graphic to show you to help visualize the relationship between the margin of the ice sheet here. So you can kind of see here, these would have been like meltwater issues coming off of the lobes like this over here. Of course, we haven't gone far enough west to get to Mississippi, but

But, yeah, that kind of does lead to the possibility, like Russ was suggesting, that, you know, were they, was it just simply a geographic thing?

you know, advantage to, to their first, they wanted to be near resources. And at the time when a lot of these were being built and occupied, these were actually quite, you know, tremendous basic resource bases, uh, fish game foraging, all of that. So they would have been, you know, pretty good places to, you know, settle in, uh,

But what did that have to do with this massive undertaking of mound building? That's sort of the question. So I've charted here some of the flows coming off the ice sheet so we can kind of get a sense of how. Now, of course, the mound structure, the earthwork structure was not contemporary with the ice sheets. The mound stuff pretty much starts showing up after the ice is gone, at least in this region.

Because in many of these valleys where this stuff exists, had the Ice Age floods occurred, they would have completely obliterated and washed away the mound structures. Yeah, it would be inhospitable there with all that. Yes. Yeah. All right. So here's the cover of the Squire and Davis book, the reissue. Yeah, I love this book. I've just spent so many hours reading.

Yeah, there it is, 1847, accepted for publication. There it is, yeah. Well, we should take a break real quick, Randall. Sure, we can do that. Take a break real quick, and we'll be right back with more Mound Mysteries. Yep.

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Mound Mysteries. Real quick. We were talking about the underwater hinge. Oh yeah, what'd you find out? Yeah, go ahead. The Huron one is far more extensive. There is something under Michigan. It's not a hinge. There is a line of obviously artificially planted, like they were put there, a line of stones. There's also a carving of a mastodon

Or something, a bison? Maybe, could be. Something on a rock, but it isn't like a Stonehenge. Okay. But there is something also under Lake Michigan. And I think one of the problems there, if I remember correctly, was that the mussels are growing all over everything. Yeah. So it's kind of hard to tell. There's some kind of, it's something like that with that site.

Yeah, and I think the water is also far more herbid. The place where the Huron stuff is is very clear. It's kind of in a deep area, and it's very clear. So the thing is, it was on this ridge, but the ridge is now way out in the middle of the lake. I think it's something like 50 kilometers from the shore. Yeah, it's way out there. So it doesn't have any sedimentation or very little sedimentation.

What we would call torriginous sedimentation, stuff washed in by rivers and creeks and stuff. Yeah, and stirred up from the shore. Yeah, but they're far away from this site. It's well preserved. And they actually found flints and artifacts and stuff down there. And they found a piece of obsidian that comes from a known site that's 4,000 kilometers away. So they knew those people were trading. No shit. How deep is this?

I think it's like 120 feet, something like that, 100 feet. We figured this out before. Well, yeah, so that obsidian, it's interesting you bring that up. Let me just, this is from the announcement of the, okay, no, this is when, yeah, this was when the American Journal of Science, there was an announcement in the American Journal of Science about the publication of this

book back of the squire davis work back in 1847 it says we are glad to have it in our power to announce the first publication so it was the first publication of the smithsonian institution wow okay i didn't realize that

This work, containing researches into the origin and purposes of the aboriginal monuments and remains of the Mississippi Valley, will embrace the details and results of extended surveys carried on during several years by Mr. E.G. Squire and Dr. E.H. Davis of Ohio.

The labors of these gentlemen embrace the opening and examination of more than 200 mounds of every variety and character, from the greatest to the least. In these examinations, the number and variety of aboriginal relics which have been brought to light must surely excite astonishment in all. And then it continues on.

In examining the remains, we discover articles which show the extent of their intercourse with other parts of the country. Thus, there are instruments of obsidian, a volcanic substance found only in Mexico, native copper and lead from Lake Superior and Upper Mississippi, marine shells and cetacean teeth from the sea,

and numbers of pearls of great beauty. And I believe there's been other evidence now suggesting that they were also trading with somebody up in the northwestern part of the U.S.,

I've forgotten. I've gotten a little vague on that. And I could be wrong. There is an obsidian source in Oregon. That's where this stuff from Huron was found. Okay. That might be what I'm thinking of. So that's 2000, right? That's correct. Yes. It was from the lake or the wagon tire. Wagon tire. That's right. Yeah. In Oregon. Central Oregon. 4,000 kilometers from Lake Huron where they found some flakes of it.

Uh-huh. Under the water. So what was that quote you were just reading where they said that these, they said obsidian from Mexico only. What's that?

Well, again, that's from the American Journal of Science, and they're making this announcement in their pages about the publication of the Squire and Davis book. Oh, okay. This was back in the 1800s. Yes, so this was in 1847. Before they knew about the Oregon Obsidian. Yes, 1847. So let's look at some of this. I'm going to...

I'm going to do a share screen. We'll just go through a few things. This first one that I haven't been to yet. Let's see. So this is an example of a conical mound. This is, yeah, this is in West Virginia. The conventional dating on it is 300 B.C. And, yeah, there was a spiral walkway up to the top. And so this would be an example of a truncated cone. It doesn't actually come up to a full cone.

Have these been excavated at all? Like how many of them have been, you know, like, do we know what's in them? Yes and no. Okay. Yes. I mean, yeah, some of them have had graves. Now the question, the problem with finding human remains in the mounds is being able to differentiate between

you know, burials that may have taken place as the mound is being built as, as compared with versus original. Yeah. Thank you. Intrusive versus original. Yes. Um,

Then let's see, what's the next one here? Okay, so this is, I think this is a diagram. I think this is in Squire and Davis, an example of some of the beautiful woodcuts and stuff. No, no, this is the Great Mound at Marietta, Ohio. So check this out. But this, yeah, this is another example. Yeah, it's deep. Yeah, and notice this one. It's got an embankment and a moat around it.

And then are those headstones? More modern headstones? What are those? Well, those are the people. Yeah, those are heads. These were the people that died trying to pile up this. Yeah. He died while building it. I know. This is Monty Python. You just got it. No. In fact, there's a number of these sites that actually have cemeteries on them.

Yeah, I'll show you some more examples. But yeah, I don't know if there's... That's really interesting to me. Yeah. That, you know, the settlers would bury... I don't think that's by accident. No. In other words, like, they knew that there was something special about the... Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. This was the burial ground. Yeah. Yeah, maybe so. I don't think it's a coincidence.

Let's see. Okay, so here's what's left of this mound now. Let's see, this was, well, it's a black and white aerial photograph, so I'm not sure I don't have a date on it, but this is, so that's the great. That's pretty nice. Yeah. Well, you know, I've got a question. Uh-oh. We talk about burial mounds and ceremony mounds, but how many mounds were just

What in my archaeology class in college, they called middens basically trash mounds. Well, yeah, a lot of I mean, the ones. Yeah, the middens were mostly on the coast. And they a lot of, you know, because they were they were harvesting so many shellfish and things. And the middens. Yeah, I visited. In fact, didn't you and I, Brad, go down there?

On one of our trips on the Gulf Coast and we... Near Pensacola. Yeah, yeah. We visited some midden mounds there. We were digging a midden mound near Auburn, Opelika, where I went to school at Auburn University. You know, they're basically just trash mounds. They were fine. Chicken bones, pork bones, whatever. But, you know, so...

When you say thousands of mounds, how many of them were garbage mounds? How many of them were burial mounds? How many of them were ceremony mounds? Do we know? Oh, I think so. Sure. I mean, I think we can look at the mounds that are extant and conclude that very few of them. Well, yeah, I don't think any of these mounds that we would be looking at here were trash mounds. Yeah, the midden mounds that I've seen, they don't have structure. They're not taped. Right.

They definitely aren't like that steep. You know, they don't have flat tops there. It's a trash pile. They're not rectilinear. They're not geometric. They're not astronomically oriented. All of the things that we find.

with part of this but i'm sure that there would have been trash heaps i'm guessing yeah it also wouldn't be surprising on a truncated mound that there might be some midden yeah on top because people would have occupied it for so many years right and left their debitage yeah but i i i don't know if you're asking this mike but i don't think you could find any places for example

You know, where you're going to find, you know, piles of plastic Coke bottles or, you know, any old heaps of rusting automobile chassis or anything like that. If that's what you're thinking about. Our middens today are pretty impressive as well. They are. There's a huge one in South DeKalb County. Yeah. And if you go foraging in there, make sure you wear your mittens or you're going to have bloody fingertips.

All right, so this is the Great Miamisburg Mound, originally about 70 feet tall, 877 feet in circumference. So that's, yeah, Miami. Let me see. No, this is not the same one. This is two different, actually two different mounds. And here's a photograph from the ground of the Great Miamisburg Mound, originally 70 feet tall and 877 feet in circumference.

As compared with Silbury Hill in England. Hmm. It's interesting that people over on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean were also taking on these extraordinary undertakings of moving big piles of earth around. I don't a lot of these in in England and these mountains here, they have like an internal stone structure.

Some of them do, yeah, and I think silberry might be one of those. Let me see. It's like they built this megalithic stone structure and then completely covered it in soil to make it into a hill. And we'll get into that, but the covering of soil is just not random heaps of... It's not random, yeah. No, no, it's very carefully laid, different kinds of soil even. Yeah.

So then we go from England and just showing the comparison between these mound structures and how we have this frost, this sort of transatlantic similarity here between these ancient earthwork constructions. Then coming in my backyard.

Here, we'll start with there, start close to home. And we've got the Great Temple Mount at Okmulgee Mount Complex in Macon, Georgia, which sits right on the fall line, which is rather interesting because the fall line is a transition. It would have been like an ancient, almost cliff, an eroded cliff where the ancient sea, ancient ocean, the ancient Atlantic Ocean came up to the fall line.

So you would have been standing on bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. And this is sitting up on the fall line. And that bluff of the fall line exposes some interesting strata going back into Eocene times. And it's one of the places where the Eocene-Oligocene strata, that contact of Eocene-Oligocene is exposed. And what's interesting about that particular strata

And I, years ago, went down on several trips with Ed Alban. He's a geochemist and astronomer. I used to know him from Fernbank Science Center. And they have a whole collection of tektites over there, which are found at this one particular strata that's just south of here on this exposed embankment. Oh, hell, what the name of it? I don't remember the name of the specific. It's a sandy layer.

But the tektites are found in there, and they date to the same date roughly 35 million years ago, marking the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene. And it's also the same date of the great impact that left the, whatever, 40 or 50-mile diameter crater on the floor of Chesapeake Bay. So the impact produced the molten splash that went up

right up into the stratosphere, spread out, and then rain back down on the Earth. And anywhere where you can find that particular layer that was the land surface at the time of the impact, you can find tektite. So there's an exposure of that just south of here. Now, I don't know if there's any connection. I'm assuming not.

But it is interesting that it's sitting right on the upper part of the fall line where that Eusina legacy and Strat is exposed. And you can see the great temple mound. It's probably Bradley up there. Yeah, pretty much that's him. Yeah, because I could tell it was when he still had some hair. You can see there. But that was one of the large ones that's in my backyard just outside of Macon.

Which also may be an interesting coincidence, because Macon is the French spelling for Mason. And it just turns out that the Grand Lodge of Georgia has, for many, many decades, going back probably even to the, maybe even to the 1700s, the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of Freemasonry of Georgia has been Macon.

which happens to be the French spelling of Macon, and this is where this particular mound complex is, which is interesting. And I will just mention as a side that masonry in Georgia was founded in 1734, if I remember the exact year. So it has quite a pedigree. In fact, the first governor, Oglethorpe, James Oglethorpe of Georgia, was a Freemason. And they helped establish the town of Savannah, and they prohibited slavery.

in the town of Savannah. So even during the, you know, antebellum days, there was no slavery in some of those areas over there that had been founded by the Masons, which, interesting. Okay, so, yeah, that's Okmulgee, which is an Indian term. And this is an overview, the plan view, where you can see all the elements of the original complex. So you can see there's a number of these rectilinear truncated pyramids.

We have a square one, and then we have two rectangles. And then we have the Great Temple Mound, which is this. And you have these rampways coming up. This is how you accessed it. Laptop. During the time that this was in active use, there was a timber structure built on top of the flat surface here. You can see the ubiquitous, always the presence of the flowing water.

You see that you'd be hard-pressed to find an ancient mound complex that doesn't seem to be oriented around and built around water. So you can see you've got a couple of different sizes of truncated pyramidal mounds. Here's the Great Temple Mound right here with the rampway going up. And you have a square, you know, a square truncated pyramidal mound there. And then you have a conical mound. And then this whole thing here is the plaza.

Oh, look, there's another little pyramid truncated flat top mound over there. Is the plaza raised or is it just flattened? It's basically flattened. I'll show you. Okay. Here, I've got photographs. Now, this photograph that you're going to see here, the next one, I believe, was taken maybe partially up on this ramp looking out over this truncated rectilinear mound right here.

So we'll go to that. So that will be your field of view looking out over that. Let's see. Yeah, I think, let's see. So there, no, that is probably this pyramid over here. I believe that's this one. Okay, yeah, and so now here's a, okay, so here's a photo. The next one is a photograph taken from up on top of the temple mound looking down towards the complex.

as i believe let's see been a while since we've been here but what's that well that's what the slide says view from the top of the temple mound oh looking towards the funeral mount okay that's all i need to do right to read the captions yeah well the thing own caption on the well okay so okay make fun of me all right well hey i'm not making fun of you you got uh

You got thousands of slides. Oh, okay. I'm definitely making fun of you, though. That is true, yeah. Look, the deal was is I've got this toolbar of Zoom, and it was sitting at the bottom of this screen completely covering the caption. But as soon as you said that, I go, wait a second. Now that toolbar is up in the sky. And you guys don't see it, do you? No, we don't. Okay, but I do. It's there.

Okay, so yeah, we're looking out towards the funeral mound. And if we go back, okay, that is not the temple mound. I think the next one, let's see. This is, okay, so that's over by the road. That's probably, what does it say? Oh, it doesn't. Okay. Well, there's the passage mound. Okay, so this is like a smaller version of Newgrange. Let's back up and see if we can find that. I should have labeled this.

Oh, okay, right here. This is the passage mound right over here. See it? The round? Yeah. Okay. Yes, that's the passage mound. Okay, and then there's a truncated pyramid next to it. And also you can see remnants of, this was probably like a canal of some kind. It's now filled in and is still part of a ditch over here. They may have been conveying water through here. And you can also look at this one.

And so it could be that the creation of the canals provided the soil and the material for the mounds. Okay, so let's see here. Yeah, here's the passage, Earth Lodge, Passage Mound, Okmulgee Complex. This is the inside with a raised dais, I guess you'd call it. The stage. And they had a ring here, and they had places for 50 participants to sit in a circle around the perimeter.

And what is the floor made of there? I think it's just like a compacted, it's like a real hard compacted clay, I believe. Okay, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, they keep it up so it's dry inside. Right. So then just by, of course, this is much larger, but this is the Newgrange, Ireland passage grave.

which we talked about in my solstice presentation that I did on the 22nd because I had this as an example of an alignment to the winter solstice. I don't show that in here. So this is the Great Mound Complex at Bartow, Georgia, called Etowah Mounds. And I believe that this is Gale Man again. Brad, you climbed up there?

Yeah, he did. You know, they had, yeah, this area was off limits. Yeah. But Brad. I had my chainsaw. Yeah, those trees are not there anymore. No, they really aren't. I may have updated slides, but this shows you how far back this goes. Yeah.

Yeah, these trees have been cleared. So the mound they're attempting to kind of restore to its pristine condition. But that's a hell of a big pile of dirt there, guys. So that's probably, what, Randall, 150 miles from Okmulgee? Yeah, probably about that. So you had the Chattahoochee River coming through Atlanta. There could have been all kinds of other things around Atlanta that just got leveled and never even were...

recorded in any way you're i would guess you're you're right this is an aerial view so go back and forth this flat top mound that brad is up on there is this mound a and you can see it's getting really overgrown so like i said this has all been cleared out and you can see the remnants of a moat over here uh you'll see it in the aerial photographs it'll show up pretty good

Over here, I think, was the borrow pit where a lot of the earth was taken from to build these mounds. Yeah, and here you see the Etowah River. And again, there's the ubiquitous association with water, usually flowing water. And if not necessarily a river or creek, then a spring.

but water almost always present in some form or another. Now, there's an interesting alignment between these two mounds. You might be able to tell that this mound here is a little bit higher than this one. Well, and there's also, I don't know, you can't see it necessarily on here, but there is a depression in the center of this one, mound B, that undoubtedly held a sighting post. And when you place yourself over on this mound, the difference in height is,

allows you to sight against the horizon, and this provides a flat reference plane against the far horizon. Does that make sense? Yes. So I think I have an example here, what we can look at. Okay, so here, the Great Mound A, Mound B, and Mound C. So here's the Great Mound, and look, here you can see, look, you see this, the remnants of the canal? Yes.

That came around and it would have connected with the river. You can see it right there. Yes, it made an island. And undoubtedly, as the river is flowing, I mean, you're going to have water flowing through. This isn't going to be still water. This is going to be flowing water through here. Now, were they doing it? Did they have wares in there or were in some way utilizing this flow? I don't know. But, yeah, it would have been connected. Or it's defensive. Or defensive, perhaps.

Yeah, because they might have been just to fend off an invasion from those old Kamalians. It is difficult to cross water if you're trying to attack. Well, this is true. This is true. It can have many uses. To say that it was defensive does not exclude other possible uses. Right, absolutely. Okay, so there we go.

The smaller mound is Mound C, middle mound is B, and then the large one is Mound A. So the large Mound A, as it describes here, this is from the 12th, as you can see here, the 12th annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890 through 91. I love this old stuff like this.

The large mound A, this is truly a grand and remarkable structure. A careful survey was made in 1884 by Mr. Victor Mendeleev. It will be seen that the highest point is 66 1⁄2 feet. Now, it's estimated, I think, other places that it may have been ultimately 4 or 5 feet higher, but there's been erosion and stuff and compaction there.

The longest diameter is 380 feet, the diameter right angles to this is 330 feet, and the area of the base a little less than three acres. From these dimensions, it is easy to calculate with approximate certainty the cubical contents of the mound, which we find to be including the roadway, about 4,300,000 cubic feet.

Now, this to me is really interesting because in most of the scenarios, we're seeing pictures of Native Americans using antler picks, and they've got various kinds of baskets that would maybe hold a half a cubic foot of material. Now, if you take a cubic foot of damp soil, for example, it might weigh between 80 even up to 100 pounds per cubic foot.

So I'm guessing, you know, I mean, typically on construction sites, if we're looking at a cubic foot of material, we're not conveying it. We could. Strong guys could convey it. But, I mean, at that point, we're using wheelbarrows. Now, from what I've read, I have never read any reference that there's evidence that they were using wheelbarrows. They certainly weren't using front-end loaders, right? So the scenario...

Well, let me give you a little more scale on that because it came up a couple of shows or a couple of months ago about, you know, how much was a cubic foot of dirt, right? To be carried around. What were their baskets? So I said something about a five gallon bucket, right? Was that, was that about a cubic foot? So I was watching some of these gold mining shows, discovery channel, and it actually came up. They said a cubic yard is 45 gallon buckets.

So that's 27 cubic feet. So 27 cubic feet, correct. A cubic yard would be 45 gallon buckets. A cubic yard of what material? Well, it's dirt. Soil? Yeah, soil. Okay. So 45? 40. 40. 40 divided by 27. So it's like one and a half five gallon buckets full. 1.48 for one cubic foot. Yeah, yeah.

And if it's moist, that's heavy. That's heavy, yeah. You're not going to be, yeah. And, yeah, like I said, I mean, a strong man could be doing it, but I don't think, you know, are you going to convey, if you're conveying, you have laborers, individual laborers out there. I mean, I'm guessing, you know, even, you know, certainly on the job sites I've been on, yeah, if it's,

20, 30, 40, 50, even 60 pounds. Yeah, guys are carrying it around. Much more than that, yeah, we're using wheelbarrows. An 80-pound bag of concrete. Concrete, there you go. Dry, won't fill a five-gallon bucket. And it's damn heavy. It's like four gallons or something. So let's be generous and say that one basket is a half a cubic foot, right? Well, you know, now you're looking at 40, 50 pounds.

So this mound was 4,300,000 cubic feet. So if we put that in the calculator... You're going to need 8.5 million trips. Yeah, you're going to need 8,600,000 trips. Yeah, that's what we're talking about here. And then you're climbing the mound wherever, you know... Yeah, the trips get harder as the job goes on. I mean, we planted...

Three acres, right? We planted a three-acre amount of vines one time. That's so much work, and we're just planting. I can't imagine taking that same section of land and being like, all right, we're going to build a mound that's 60 feet high. 66 feet and 6 inches, which they didn't want to say. Well, yeah, I mean. 66 feet, 66, 6. Yeah, you guys are out there with some of your coworkers or your buddies or whatever, and you go, hey, you know what would be cool?

Why don't we, after we get done foraging for the day, why don't we move around, you know, eight million cubic feet of dirt and make a big pile? Let's make a big pile of dirt, 78 feet high in our spare time. I mean, it really has seemed to me like I did a bunch of reading on the mounds.

A lot of it in conjunction with reading about giants, I will admit, but still there's lots of interesting stuff with the mounds and the way that they are struck, at least the ones that have had archaeological trenches dug into them. And they usually would just they kind of dig straight in from the side, you know, to see. And there's there's a structure in there.

And a lot of them, they look to me like, you know, the oldest burials are actually subsurface. They're below the surface of the ground. And then the entire mound is constructed on top of those original burials in a way that implies that it wasn't –

Like a building construction project, but more a generational one. As important people died, they were laid to rest on top of the ancestors. And the whole thing gets taller and taller and taller. And eventually then you have this mound structure. But it's like they kept burying these people. Well, right here in my house.

In the PowerPoint show that we're doing here in the presentation coming up, and we won't get to it tonight, I'm quite sure, but I've got an account in there of the excavation of a mound, and there were apparently multiple burials, and there was like three or four skeletons, and the one at the top was the most pristine, and as you went deeper, they got progressively more degraded, and at the very bottom,

There was a skeleton that pretty much as soon as they opened it to the air, it began just disintegrating. It just falls apart, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So how old is that? Right. Yeah. Okay, so let me go back to the screen share here. Now, this is a view taken from Mound A, the lower mound, looking over Mound B. And we can get here. Where am I here?

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And then you can't really make it out from here, but if these trees were missing exactly in this linement here, if you projected this line to the horizon...

You can see that there's a swale in the hill here. You've got a higher hill. We can't see your cursor. Oh, sorry. There we go. So you can see it comes down, and it's concealed right behind the level of the mound here. And to me, that's not coincidence that when you're standing on this lower mound, this pretty much defines this flat area of horizon pretty much precisely.

In which direction are you looking in this? We're looking west. West. So you think that the... So if they were using this as a sight line, you think that they controlled the vegetation back there? Would have kept the trees? Yes. Yes, I would think so. And the other thing is you can't see from this is that if you can see this, there's actually a little notch or saddle in the horizon between the hills right precisely lined up with the center of this. Oh, Brad's in the way. Yeah, but if he would get his ass... Yeah, I was...

Yeah. Well, you know, Brad, you know, he wants to be the center of attention all the time. Got to be in the middle of the picture. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Now, this is the winter solstice. Is that right? Yes. So it's not west. It's like southwest. Well, yeah, that's more accurate. I was thinking it was solstice. It wasn't equinox. I don't remember if you said or not, but yeah. Right.

So this is from the Great Mound A looking down onto Mound C. Is that it? Mound A. Yeah, Mound C is the lower of the two mounds. So this is standing on top of Mound C looking across Mound B. And this is up on the Great Mound A looking down on Mound C. And right here is the Etowah River.

And, you know, in the spring and fall, boy, this place is really nice. I mean, it's very pristine and beautiful, beautiful section of the, uh, of the Ottawa river, which is a great river for canoeing and tubing and stuff like that. Um, the next slide, uh, let's go back here to this. The next slide is taken right over in this area, looking into the ditch, uh,

You come in, the parking lot is up here. You can't see it. It's off the side of the picture here. But you come in through here and then you can look and you can see part of the part of the ditch, which is this. And this is undoubtedly where the earth would have come from.

And it would have been through here that the water, you know, connected with, remember from the overview, the water would have come in and been flowing through here. Now, what is this? I don't know. Maybe they would have something interrupting the flow. It'd be interesting. I definitely, this was part of some kind of hydraulic engineering system, I believe, more so than a defensive thing. Like a bridge?

Maybe it would have been a bridge. I'm going to need to get back out there and look. But yeah, this thing, again, it wrapped around, like you said, an island. Yeah. Oh, I've seen that. Yeah. Well, this was found at Etowah Mound. I love that symbol. Yeah. Amazing is right. Yeah, definitely a rattlesnake. And you know what? Yeah, I mean, the symbolism of this is extremely interesting.

When you look at it, I mean. Yeah, I mean, it's very, you know, Ouroboros somehow. They kind of look like dragons also, which is really strange. And they have a sort of a cat aspect to the face. Yeah. And then, of course, the eye palm. That's what that is. If that's what that is, right. Yeah. Yep. It could be a UFO. Yeah.

So I have more on the Edoa mounds, but we don't have a lot of time to spend, and there's so much, and we're only going to just barely scratch the surface in our presentation tonight. But we're going to move on to some of the Ohio mounds just so we can get a better picture of some of this. Why do you think the edges are not? Well, that, yeah, I don't know.

But there must have been a reason. Well, let me see. And how many notches are there? Yeah, I was wondering how many sections. 17. Kyle's been counting. 17. Hmm, 17. Okay, so 17. So that would mean that each one is going to be 21.176 angle if you draw from the center. I wonder if the eye is in the dead center of the gorget.

Shell. I wonder what kind of shell. You know what I just thought? It could be part of a musical instrument, like a bridge, where if you had a bow and you had multiple strings on the bow, the disc would hold the strings apart so you could pluck the different strings. That's interesting. I don't know how big it is. Yeah, you're right. It does kind of look like it might be something like that. Okay. Go to the next slide. This is also from Squire and Davis.

And when we look at this, this is a map of a 12-mile section of the Scioto Valley in the vicinity of... Was it Chillicothe? Yeah, I think it was Chillicothe. Chillicothe is what I've heard multiple times. Chillicothe, okay. And Scioto. Scioto and Chillicothe. Okay, circa 1850. Well, okay, this is sort of typical. I mean, I'll start looking here. You can see there's...

There's some kind of a rectilinear structure there. There's some open, some semicircular stuff here. You see a rectangle, I mean a square with a contiguous circle tangent right there with what looks like it would have been a causeway there. Another...

feature over here, a large ring structure there. Then you get down here. Here's a cluster within a ring, probably a natural, I'm guessing. Then you look at all of this down here. Look at this over here. All down in here, you've got these tremendous structures on an enormous scale. And here is the... The ones with the dotted lines are enclosures.

Right, that's what the legend says. And then the solid lines are actual mounds. So like up there at D, there's a square, there's a rectilinear enclosure right next to a circular mound. Right. Yeah. And then this would be the causeway. Yeah. And it probably, you can actually see here, look, the embankments. So this is a bit of an underfit.

situation here so the terminus of this causeway was probably at one time at the water's edge let's look at the next there's so much there i just all right the high banks earthworks in ohio now this is just i'm very intrigued by this particular shape you find this shape duplicated at newark yeah but this is the high bank so look area 20 acres

That's a pretty good-sized circle there. Yeah. And 18 acres for the flattened octagon. So even a ring like this is going to be very impressive. It looks like it says 250 feet in diameter. This one is 300 feet right here. This is 300 feet in diameter. So that's a football field in diameter. This one, also 300 feet in diameter.

This one down here says, oh. 300 feet, and then I don't know what that was. That's 300 there, I think. Yep, that's 300. So now you got three of these. They're all the same size, and they're connected by these raised embankments here coming down. And then you have, you know, was this at one time a full circle, and then this was eroded away? I would guess so. I would think, but I don't know.

Yeah, that's a good point. This thing here must have originally been, I mean, it looks like it could easily be double one of these, so it must have been close to 600 feet in diameter. Also, I just love the draftsmanship of these. Oh, I know. I mean, they're just beautiful. Yeah, they are. Just got to note that it kind of looks like the arc of the Big Dipper, you know, Ursa Major, those four circles there.

Look at this. Bradley. I like it. I think Brad's got himself an attaboy tonight. Holy crap.

The first time for everything. Really, first time. Ooh, you know what would be... I'm still below zero. What would be really cool, we could get a photograph of the Big Dipper and juxtapose it on top of this and see how closely it aligns. That would be very cool. Looking at this, I'm curious as to how much of this at high banks still exists.

Probably remnants, but probably only remnants. Let's see. What's this next aerial footage? Oh, so check this out. Yeah, there's the circle in the square. Wow. Taken in 1938.

So at this point, it's probably eroded down to almost ground level. Yeah. This looks almost like a ghost of the original structure. Those are farm fields, so it's been plowed. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost completely gone. Yeah. But that kind of helps to give you a sense of the scale. Yeah. Of the thing. Looks like we've got over here. I think that's railroad tracks there, I believe. Yeah. Just barely missed it. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Mound City, Ohio. So this is 13 acres. Let's see. What is the area of the Great Pyramid? 13. Between 13 and 14. So this is on the same scale as the Pyramid of Cheops.

Or Khufu. Khufu. What do you guys call it? It's the same. I mean, it's the same, just different names for the same guy. Yeah. Cheops, Khufu. Khufu is what they call it in Egypt. Well, I'll go with Khufu then. Yeah. Cheops is a Greek name, I think, for the same guy. Well, let's go with Khufu if that's the earlier name. And yeah, I kind of like that better than Cheops anyway. Khufu. Khufu. Hey.

Maybe if I get a new dog, I'll name him Foo Foo. That's a good idea. That's a great dog name. Foo Foo. Coughray. Foo Foo and Coughray is what you should call them. So with this ring structure here at 28 acres, it looks like you could probably fit the pyramid, the Great Pyramid, really almost right inside there. 28 acres. I don't know what the diameter. We could easily calculate that, but I'm not going to do it now for the interest of time.

Yeah, we got to wrap it up here, too. We're out of time. That one has a mound in the center, a conical mound in the center. Right here. And then it's got all these gaps along the edge. Yeah, gaps. Yes, gaps. And there's probably reasons for those gaps. They're not just arbitrary. Right. Look at the two, how they're on either side, the left and right lower. Oh, yeah. Those are to the south.

Of that mound. These two right here. Yeah, but they're almost at the same angle from the central mound from each other. You know what I'm saying? And it's to the south. Yeah. Almost directly. And then you got these two over here. Exactly. They're almost the same angle as the ones on the left. And if you were standing on the mound looking down, you'd be looking straight south. Well, the first thing that would come to my mind is...

This southeast, you're looking at perhaps summer solstice. No, no, no. One of these up here would be summer solstice. Oh, yeah, that's right. One of these, this would be winter solstice sunrise and sunset over here. But I don't know the angles, but I bet you just by taking this survey, we could get pretty accurate angles and determine the azimuth of solstice from this latitude.

And I bet you we'd find that it's going to be almost right on. So then the one to the north could be the summer solstice sunrise, maybe. Oh, no, you mean this up here. That gap right there. Well, it would be this one. That one, yeah. Yeah, this one is looking... Hmm, what would this be sighting? The north? Almost due north. But you're almost looking from here. So...

I'm guessing that you could stand at the center of this, stand up on this conical mound, and then sight through these apertures to positions on the horizon, maybe? Yeah. And then there's a tiny mound almost directly north of the central mound inside that circle as well. There's a little bitty mound way up there. Way... Right? Small mound. Small mound right there. Small mound, yeah. So that might be a north sight line. Mm-hmm.

And here you got the cross section. Yeah, sections. What does that say? Is it 12 feet, 10 feet, 11 feet high? Is that showing you how high these berms are? Yes. Okay. That's right. Yeah, so I have to look at it a little closer to see exactly where these cross sections were taken.

Well, we got to wrap it up here, Randall. Okay, well, this will be the last slide. How long are we going to be doing mounds? Yeah. Well, I got enough to go for a while. I mean, we're just barely getting into it. We're going to need to talk about giants. Oh, I got to hear some giant talk. Well, I've got a section in here about those findings, yes. Okay, good. Well, let's take, well, this will be our last slide. All right. So here we go. This is getting, now this is getting truly monumental.

Diameter, this thing up here is a football field wide, 300 feet, right? Let me move this over out of the way so I can see that guy. 20 acres here. Diameter of the circle, 360 feet. The side of the square, 960 feet. Okay. Diameter is 1,050 of that big circle. Oh, okay.

It's the diameter of circle. Let me see. Where did that come from? Diameter of, hmm. That might be a, well, that 1,050 is an interesting one in itself because it might have actually been 1,056 originally to the outside. I think that's showing inside diameter. Let me see. Where did I get this? This might actually be from a different mound. I'll correct that. But then notice the causeway here.

leading right up to the edge of this embankment. So that embankment, here's the river, right? So again, if we're going back to a time when the water level was much higher, which it clearly was because that's how this embankment got here, this causeway would have led down to the river's edge. Yeah, the hope didn't work. So it's good. Look, they give a compass rose here. So yeah, what I'd like to do is take some of these, maybe enlarge them and sit down with a

compass and a straight edge and play with a little bit like they squared the circle there yeah the circle where did I get that when it says right there a thousand and fifty feet I wonder I may have let's see if I go 20 acres and

times 43,560, then that's the area pi r squared. Well, I won't do that now, but I'll do it after we're done. Yeah, so let's wrap it up. And yeah, there's lots more to dive into in ancient, what I like to call archaic America.

Awesome. Excellent. Lots more. Lots more. Juicy stuff. So our next special episode of Cosmographia, we will continue to dive into archaic America, the lost civilizations that was once upon a time and how utterly magisterial and grand it really was. Excellent. Okay, we like it. RandallCarlson.com.

Sign up for the newsletter and check the website for information on future tours. Definitely get that newsletter. Randall writes great stuff. What is it? Is it twice a month or once a month? Once a month. Once a month. But it's typically, yeah, I get into a lot of stuff. And I did actually get into some stuff that...

We will get into here on the show, but kind of a little intro or preface to some of the Earthworks stuff, talking about recent research at Poverty Point. All right. I forget. Have you guys been to Poverty Point yet? Don't think so. No, I don't think so. Northern Louisiana. Northwestern Louisiana. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So that's... All right. All right.

Shake it up. Yeah, we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. All right. Gentlemen, join in. Good night. You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need.

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