So what. They are piles of freakin dirt. I have made hundreds of dirt piles in my day. I don't know what is so special about a really old dirt pile. Is there something to it? Is there some base in there? Some type of architecture, or is it just a big pile of dirt. Huge pyrimids with multi ton stones and intricate tunnels are impressive. Piled up dirt is not so impressive to me. Like I said, my friends and I never dug in the mounds, but ask anyone who grew up between the 40s and the 70s and digging in the Indian mounds was a recess activity. It sounds pretty terrible, but that doesn't mean it wasn't widespread or frowned upon at the time. My friends and I just found pots and crap that lazy Indians had left along the bayous over the years. I guess littering becomes important after a certain amount of time.
There is a difference of opinion in the field between those that want to dig everything up and put it in museums and those that want to eliminate or reduce excavations by use of remote sensing techniques (like ground penetrating radar and magnetic resonance) and leave the artifacts in-situ for future examination. Every excavation destroys something. Todays most careful excavations will be considered to be vandalism by future archaeologists. Many feel that the few significant sites that have managed to remain preserved should remain so. Once we had to cut open someone's brain to see if there was a tumor inside. Now we can MRE someones head and see what's inside without risking damage to healthy brain tissue. It works that way with archaeological sites, too. If the Holy Grail or King Tut's gold sneakers are discovered, they can be carefully extracted without leveling the mound. Most likely it will be bones or common artifacts that we have plenty of examples of in museums and it can be left in place.
I don't know the details of the excavation. I could support a limited excavation if the proper remote sensing work has been done.
They haven't given many details period. Show me a graph or video where the mounds will be gone in 20 years if kids continue to slide down them 7 days a year. (6 next year, you bastards). We'll see what kind of info they have Saturday.
Nobody has suggested that. You said that kids sliding down the mounds cause less damage the weather. I asked you how do you know this. You don't. The archaeologists do.
I know they have survived 6,000 years of nature. I guarantee that has done more damage than 180 days of kids sliding down them. Sometimes common sense is all I need. I bet 1 day of excavation trumps them both. Call it a hunch.
They haven't survived 6,000 years very well... They were originally 500 feet higher and are significant because they were originally constructed to guide alien spaceships to the ceremonial tailgating areas of the "ancient ones"...where do you think Boudin came from....earth???? :hihi:
Then by that logic, we should let people continue to jam their cars up against the oak trees as well. Yeah people did it for 50 years, and people chipped away at Stonhenge for thousands of years. What is so mystifying about the word cumulative? And where is your data to support your claim of weather doing more damage?
