Watson Brake
Watson Brake is an archaeological site from the Middle Archaic Period south of Monroe , in Ouachita Parish , Louisiana . Was found a complex Erdwerk of eleven as Mounds designated artificial mounds of different height, the m by a plurality of elongated back to an oval with about 300 in east-west and 200 m north-south direction on a total area of about nine hectares are connected. The mounds of a hunter, gatherer and fisherman culture are dated 3500-3000 BC. And represent the oldest known complex structure in America.
The facility is named after a watercourse of the same name, which in turn combines the name of a former landowner Watson with an Old English term for wasteland .
The attachment
On a river terrace above the Ouachita River , eleven mounds lie around an almost flat surface. Today the course of the river is around 500 m from the facility, in prehistoric times a tributary ran directly below the mounds, which was cut off from the inflow over time, silted up and now forms a swampy lowland. They are divided into a northern and a southern semi-oval, in the west there is a larger gap, in the east a smaller one at a cut in the slope edge. The highest mound A reaches a height of 7.50 m above the center, the lowest mound K of only around 1 m. The current heights correspond roughly to the original conditions, but a differently good state of preservation is considered likely.
The facility was built in several construction phases. The first beginnings took place around 3500 BC. When Mounds K and B, and possibly also Mound A, were started. As a result, the builders settled south and west of the first mounds and accumulated food preparation waste, which was found as a stratum that was particularly rich in organic matter. The complex in today's sense was built from around 3350 BC. Erected, Mound J probably only followed around 3000 BC. About half of the mounds were raised several times after long interruptions, which shows that the bottoming had already started. The mounds E, G, H, K and L had only one construction phase, which is surprising at least with regard to the second largest mound E. Mounds C and F have two layers separated by a young soil horizon, I and J have three, B and D four layers. The highest mound A has at least seven layers, each separated by a soil horizon. However, it is not entirely clear whether the drilling and sampling reached the original terrain level before the mound was built, so that even deeper layers may exist. The building material of the mounds is the surrounding soil, the northern mounds are essentially composed of the material of the eastern slope edge and rich in gravel from the river terrace, the southern mounds are probably a little too far from the slope edge, which is why the material for their construction is from was taken from the immediate area southwest and contains hardly any rubble.
The ridges that connect the mounds are only partially built from the surrounding earth; large parts consist of the remains of the food preparation, in particular the fragments of cracked cooking stones and a large number of clay objects that were also used for cooking and baking.
The total volume of the facility is around 33,900 m³ or a little more than ten Olympic swimming pools. Comparative experiments with human labor classify this volume as easily achievable for a culture at the level of the middle archaic period. With working hours of several months per year between the most important phases of the acquisition of food, between 35 and 40 people could have set up the system in just seven years. Now that the data point to a widespread construction in several phases over around 500 years, these requirements are put into perspective considerably.
The residents of Watson Brake
An analysis of the artefacts found allows an insight into the living conditions and management of the prehistoric inhabitants of the region. They lived mainly on aquatic food from the watercourse immediately adjacent to the facility. Herringbones make up more than half of the weight of the traces of animal food found, the significantly heavy bones of white-tailed deer in relation to the meat content make up 30 percent by weight, other food classes such as small mammals or water birds are each less than 10%. River snails and mussels were found only in small numbers, but with great biodiversity, and the shells were very small, which indicates that the stocks were heavily extracted and overused. Vegetable foods provided the roots of hackberry trees and goose feet as well as the fruits of hickory and grapevines . Morphological studies show that these are natural varieties and not yet cultivated plants . There is also no evidence of the storage of supplies, which also suggests a pure existence as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
By examining statoliths from the fish waste it was possible to determine that all seasons occur in roughly balanced proportions. Watson Brake was used all year round, although it is not known whether it is a real sedentary lifestyle or whether hunters and gatherers passed the facility sporadically but largely evenly over the year and whether in the latter case it was always the same people.
Their stone tools represented the residents themselves from the rubble of the river terrace forth as the countless discounts show and splitter tool production. A few stone tools are made of sandstone or silicified wood , these materials are found a few kilometers away in the immediate vicinity. Projectile points , drills and blades predominated among the tools . Some of the projectile points could be assigned to known types; almost half of the identified types are Evans points with a wide flank and side indentations, as many Ellis points and a Pontchartrain point that is unusually large and wide. In addition, cores were found from which chips had already been extracted and which continued to be used for the production of new blades. Other tools were hammers, grinding stones and various grating stones. Artificial pearls , which were used as jewelry, were also made from the local material . This required narrow stone drills, which were found in large numbers. In the climate of northern Louisiana, artifacts made from organic material are poorly preserved. Evidence can be found of awls made of bones or antlers, a bony spatula, fishhooks and a finished and several started jewelry pendants made of bones.
Most of the finds are cracked cooking stones and various objects made of baked clay that were used to prepare the dishes. Six fire pits and three post holes were also found. The latter lay on their backs or in a floor horizon inside a mound. The tool finds were surrounded by thousands of splinters and debris from the production of stone tools. A total of 32,640 worked stones and fragments were found, with a total weight of 16.9 kilograms. Of these, only 392 were finished or clearly identifiable tools and 175 cores, the rest were fragments and chips from production. The stone finds were distributed over most of the Strati in the mounds and ridges, only the upper strata of the higher mounds were relatively poor. Like the distribution of the fire pits, this indicates that rings and low mounds served as living space for people, some of which were covered with earth again in later construction phases.
The open space enclosed by mounds and ridges is almost empty of any artifacts, the density of finds on the flanks of the mounds and ridges quickly increases to the average level in and on the earthworks. Either the open space was kept clean for or for cultic purposes, or the residents of the facility never entered it for the same reasons. No graves are known at Watson Brake, however a few scattered human bones were found embedded in the building material. The archaeologists interpret this as an involuntary intervention in earlier burials while digging up the building material.
As a result, the excavators from Watson Brake come to the conclusion that it was an egalitarian hunter-gatherer culture that does not yet show any signs of social stratification . The use of exclusively local stones speaks against the supra-regional exchange of goods or trade. The favor of the location with inexhaustible natural resources allowed them to build mounds beyond pure subsistence .
Meaning and tradition
In 1997, the Watson Brake mounds were the first mounds in southeast North America to be clearly dated to the Middle Archaic period using scientific methods . To date, the mounds of Poverty Point were considered to be the oldest earthworks in North America, although their age was around 1500 BC. Was adopted. The dating of the beginning of Poverty Point has now been moved a little more than 200 years forward to the 18th century BC after new sampling since 2001 and through significantly improved methods. Corrected. Until the publication of the first dates of Watson Brake in the middle archaic period, the cultures of this era were viewed as highly mobile, small hunter-gatherer groups with little incentive for social change or the development of social leadership. The construction of large earthworks according to a well thought-out plan did not fit these ideas.
In the first statements, archaeologists spoke of a radical break in scientific theories:
"Archaeologists rarely find something that changes our view of the past as completely as in this case."
Watson Brake is also the most complex of all the mound systems that have become known in the meantime. Were erected. They range from a single mound to groups of up to eight mounds and Watson Brake with eleven. The Central Archean mound systems also differ in the artifacts found. Only west of the river were Evans- type projectile points with particularly wide flanks and lateral indentations found, only in northeast Louisiana were the objects made of baked clay found, which are considered to be an aid in the preparation of food. One of the mounds at Frenchman's Bend is the only one in which people have created a level surface several times, which is then used as the floor of a living space before the mound was raised long later. Post holes in a wooden structure are found under two mounds, also at Frenchman's Bend and Monte Sano , and at Monte Sano there is also a fireplace that was used for a cremation . Joe W. Saunders, director of the Watson Brake excavation, concludes that "the only common characteristic of the Central Archaic mounds is the mounds themselves." He notes that the mounds were not expressions of an entrenched culture and that independent, simultaneous cultural currents existed in the Middle Archaic Period, of which the building of mounds was only one.
The culture of the builders is difficult to grasp because almost exclusively the mounds have been excavated. No burial sites with possible grave goods are known and settlement or hunting sites without mounds have so far not been investigated in more detail. In addition, many mounds have only been dated through artifacts, not scientifically.
The tradition of the mounds broke around 3000 BC. And was only resumed around 1300 years later at the end of the archaic period. The reason for this interruption and resumption is unknown. In the meantime the long-distance trade in particularly good stone material and other goods developed. Then the systems of Poverty Point west and Jaketown Site were built east of the Mississippi River. The builders of these regions concentrated on one facility each and largely refrained from building further independent mounds.
Regardless of the mounds on the lower Mississippi, was also created in the middle of the archaic period around 3000 BC. BC over 1000 km northeast on the Ohio River and its tributaries another tradition of building monumental structures. Here, however, people did not build from the ground, but instead accumulated enormous amounts of mussel shells, an essential part of their diet, to form what are known as shell middens . The culture, which is referred to as the Indian Knoll phase after the Indian Knoll site , is considered to be a further beginning in the development of more complex societies in Southeast North America, whereby it is assumed that the middens initially emerged involuntarily from food preparation waste in suitable and frequently visited residential areas and were only systematically expanded over time. In Indian Knoll over 1100 graves, some with grave goods, were found, which offer an insight into the culture that is missing in Watson Brake, as no graves are known here.
Research history
The Watson Brake Mounds were first noticed by a local resident in 1981 after a section of the site was cleared of trees in a clear cut , and in 1984 an archaeologist drew an initial plan of the facility, which was first mentioned in a publication the following year. The first dates were based on surface finds and assumed an origin in the second millennium BC. At the end of the Archaic Period and thus within the time frame of the well-known Poverty Point complex around 100 km to the west. However, the typical earth and clay balls that were used in the Poverty Point Culture to heat food were missing . In 1992 a pedological investigation of the largest mound was carried out, which is a somewhat earlier date around 2000 BC. Probably made. All of these dates were considered controversial, and the mounds of Poverty Point were generally believed to be the oldest secured. In 1997 the results of drilling into mounds and connecting ridges were published, along with the first 14 C-dates using material from the drill core. The 14 C data settled Watson Brake to once again well over 1,000 years earlier in the middle of the Archaic period on, with an age from 5,400 to 5,000 years Before Present . During the drilling, individual artifacts were also recovered from the material of the mounds, including projectile points of the Evans type with lateral indentations that match the dating to the Middle Archaic Period.
Before 1998, the southern half of the site could not be examined because the previous landowner did not allow entry. It was only when the property was bought by a development association and transferred to the state of Louisiana that archaeologists had access to the entire complex. An extensive, multidisciplinary program led to a thorough investigation conducted by the University of Louisiana at Monroe , which was completed in 2004 and published in 2005. The data pushed the first approaches of the plant forward by another 100 years and provided clues to the history of the building through the analysis of drilling profiles. Artifacts were also examined and identified.
literature
- Joe W. Saunders, Rolfe D. Mandel, et al .: Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana . In: American Antiquity , Vol. 70, No. 4 (October 2005), pages 631-668
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Unless otherwise stated, this chapter is based on Saunders et al. 2005
- ↑ a b c Joe Saunders: Are we Fixing to Make the Same Mistake Again? In: Jon L. Gibson, Philip J. Carr (Eds.): Signs of Power - The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast . University of Alabama Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8173-1391-5 , pages 146-161
- ^ Jon L. Gibson: The Power of Beneficial Obligation in First Mound-Building Societies . In: Jon L. Gibson, Philip J. Carr (Eds.): Signs of Power - The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast . University of Alabama Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8173-1391-5 , pages 254-269; 265
- ↑ a b Joe W. Saunders, Rolfe D. Mandel, et al .: A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400-5000 Years Before the Present . In: Science , Volume 277 (September 19, 1997), pp. 1796-1799
- ↑ a b c Heather Pringle: Oldest Mound Complex Found at Louisiana Site . In: Science , Volume 277 (September 19, 1997), pages 1761-1762, ISSN 0036-8075 , English
- ↑ Saunders et al., 2005, p. 663
- ↑ Michael Russo: Southeastern Archaic Mounds . In: Kenneth E. Sassaman, David G. Anderson: Archeology of the Mid-Holocene Southeast , University Press of Florida, 1993, ISBN 0-8130-1434-4 , pages 259-287
- ^ George M. Crothers: The Green River in Comparison to the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Archaic: To Build Mounds or not to Build Mounds? In: Jon L. Gibson, Philip J. Carr (Eds.): Signs of Power - The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast . University of Alabama Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8173-1391-5 , pages 86-96
Coordinates: 32 ° 22 '6.1 " N , 92 ° 7' 52" W.