An article by Richard Thornton in The Examiner
The oldest public architecture in the Western Hemisphere can be found in northeastern Louisiana. Is it a coincidence that prior to the construction of dams, levees and drainage canals, much of northeastern Louisiana was under water during the annual spring floods?
Drive west on Interstate 40 from Memphis, Tennessee. After crossing over the Mississippi River, you will enter Arkansas’s primary rice growing region. It stretches for over a 100 miles west of Memphis. As you drive along I-40 you will notice modern houses perched atop, what appears to be Indian mounds. Many farmers have also constructed their barns and tractor sheds atop earthen mounds. These small hills are not ancient Native American structures, but piles of dirt primarily erected during the 20th century.
Eastern Arkansas experiences the same floods by the Mississippi River as eastern Louisiana. During the spring, and sometimes after winter storms, these “American” mounds become man-made islands. The apparent inconvenience of placing one’s home 30 feet above one’s farm then becomes perfect clear. Arkansas’s rice farmers benefit from the annual flooding of the Mississippi that prepares the landscape for planting rice seedlings. A natural disaster for these farmers would be a year when the Mississippi does not flood!
The mounds of the Southeastern Indians were generally associated with major rivers. All of these rivers at least occasionally flooded. Could it be that mounds were originally built to provide a safe haven for villages during a flood, and later were constructed to keep the temples and elite’s houses above water during floods? Over time the association between mounds and the elite would have become an architectural tradition within itself, regardless of the potential threat of flooding.
Watson Brake is the oldest known public architecture in the Western Hemisphere. It was discovered by Reca Bambourg Jones in 1981 in the flood plain of the Ouachita River near Monroe, Louisiana. The archaeological zone consists of 11 mounds arranged in an oval, varying in height today between 3 feet and 25 feet. (See the site plan in my slide show.) The oval has a major axis of about 900 feet and a minor axis of about 834 feet. The site is still owned by the Gentry family, and not open to the public.
More, with images at
http://www.examiner.com/architecture-design-in-national/were-mounds-originally-built-to-protect-native-americans-from-floods
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