Submitted by coldrum --
According to the administration, ropes intended to block access to the LSU Mounds during LSU home games were removed because, when ignored, they were dangerous. This is not the first time that access has been an issue. In 1984, a coed was killed on top of one mound when she was run over by a pickup truck. Her death prompted the brickwork that now blocks vehicle access to the mounds.
But the LSU Mounds have also been central to a passionate scientific debate about the antiquity of mounds. In the 1980s, archaeologists believed that mounds appeared in the Southeast no earlier than 100 B.C. because mounds could only be built by inegalitarian societies fueled by maize agriculture. Before 100 B.C., folks in the Southeast were egalitarian hunter-gatherers; ergo, they did not build mounds.
There were a few holdouts to this model. One was Robert Neuman, former curator of anthropology at the Museum of Natural Science at LSU. In conjunction with archaeological excavations around the flanks of the mounds where the brickwork would go, Neuman took soil cores through the mounds. Soils from the base of the mound were radiocarbon dated to about 5,000 years old! These results were not received well by most of the archaeological community; some of the published discussion was quite acrimonious.
It has taken over 20 years, but most archaeologists now accept that hunters and gatherers built mounds thousands of years ago. In fact, now that it's accepted, 5,000-year-old mounds are popping up all over the place. Indeed, recent coring of the LSU Mounds extends the date of one mound to 6,200 years ago.
Let's keep 'em around a little more.
Source: The Opinion page of http://www.theadvertiser.com.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road