Earthen Burial Enigmas



  2. Cahokia Mounds
  3. Wayzata, MN Indian Burial site
  4. Stonehenge
  5. Tell Hamoukar
  6. Çatalhöyük, Turkey
  7. Loulan – A Lost Kingdom in the Taklamakan "desert"
  8. Egyption Pyramids
  9. Death by Giant Kangaroos
  10. Skateholm's Burials
  11. Kurgans of Altay
  12. Serpent Mound

Indian Mounds
On the outset, I would like to note that the Indian Mound aspect of my research is secondary to the main thesis.  The primary interest here is one of timing of the impacts and subsequent ejecta events.

The majority of the visual evidence I am gathering comes from satellite photos.  Google has a great free system, and I also have access to TerraServer, which is a fee-based offering of various satellite providers data.

I have been simply looking at the "footprints" of the various mound sites from that perspective. The satellite perspective provides a confirmation of the characteristic oval shape, should it exists, and an indication of the arrival azimuth, which is along the major oval axis.

It is imperative that the concept of ejecta is established.  The hypothesis suggests that the vast majority of what is splashed out of the impact crater is terrestrial material.  As such, the ejecta emplacements will represent normal earth.  What will be obvious is that there will be no sedimentation horizons and no grain size differentiation across the soil mass.  It is these characteristics that also suggest a man-made mound. Any normal alluvial sedimentation process would result in horizons.

There have been reported findings of extraterrestrial material within the mounds.  This is commonly accepted as being a sign that the various Indian tribes traded these amongst themselves as valuable trinkets.

The descriptions of earthen structures most indicative are those from The 1997 Grand Plaza Waterline Excavation, published in the cahokian WINTER 1997-98, by Timothy R. Pauketat, Ph.D. His article also discuses the notes taken during much earlier excavations. The graphic that accompanies the article clearly shows that the grand plaza had an oval floorplan. I interpret that the survivors cleared most of the ejecta that struck the primary village and left the central structure as a monument.
http://www.cahokiamounds.com/centralplaza.html

Quote: Several years back, researchers from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville observed, using electromagnetic instruments and small test excavations, that this monumental plaza was not natural (Dalan 1997). Rather, the Grand Plaza had been leveled through a cut-and-fill method around the beginning of the Mississippian period (now dated to about A.D. 1050). In 1994, with a crew from the University of Oklahoma, I found evidence beneath Mound 49 that corroborated their results: the earliest mound stages were built at the same time as the plaza was leveled.



What is overlooked is that the cut and fill took the plaza down to the natural ground level.  The site is immediately alongside the Mississippi river flood plain in an area that should have no raised natural landforms to cut down.Also, the article suggests that a site population of 10,000 (!!!) people would have been expected to support such a massive construction progress.

I find the following as suggesting that the oval nature of the mounds was not initially recognized:
http://www.cahokiamounds.com/mound49.html>http://www.cahokiamounds.com/mound49.html

About 100 meters (328.1 feet) south of Monks Mound is a tumulus that was called Red Mound on one of the park's early signs, supposedly because so much red pottery was discovered there. Mound 49 appears on the Patrick Map as a conical mound of regular form. The contours on the 1966 UWM Map, however, suggest a more oval or elongated shape with an east-west axis of nearly 50 meters (164.0 feet) and a north-south axis of approximately 35 meters (114.8 feet).

http://www.cahokiamounds.com/byname.html>http://www.cahokiamounds.com/byname.html

Displays a link page to the mounds by name. Of interest is Mound 79:

http://www.cahokiamounds.com/mound79.html>http://www.cahokiamounds.com/mound79.html

which notes: "The mound was composed of the hardest kind of buckshot gumbo, with no sign of stratification."

As for other mound sites, here are some google links:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Etowah+Indian+Mounds&t=k&ll=34.134009,-84.808316&spn=0.02618,0.026093&t=k

where the river has divided the lower  oval (the main mound site), with the souther half lost to farming activity. Another site is located along side of the man-made running track in upper left.  The over-riding structure is the large oval-fronted hill on the right. Scaling up, I interpret that the entire area is overlain by overlapping tear-drop elliptical shapes oriented NNW<>SSE.