00:00.65 Jesus of Nayarit Welcome back to a life nerds podcast we're talking about the lsu mounts that were just recently discovered to be very old. We're here with Dr Tune and Dr Miller I'm gonna read a ah selection from this this paragraph if you guys want to turn your pages to page seven ninety Six of this article second paragraph. The lsu campus mounds were first recognized in the 18 hundreds with archeological work starting in the late nineteen hundreds following the death in 1984 of a sun bathing student who was run over by a small truck that was driven over the northern mound. Let's just stop there. Um. 00:37.29 Jesus of Nayarit Ah, well I guess special efforts are made to protect the bounds. Um, so not only was she run over by a truck but she was on the mound apparently and the truck went over the mound and ran her over they would have seen her. 00:48.74 archpodnet Was it them Duke boys. 00:48.84 Shane Are many like so here's the thing like Duke's a hazard style they could have like like went over it and she was some bathing on the backside of it and like just some goodle boys. You know, like over the top and. 00:50.52 Jesus of Nayarit Um, or them do voice. 01:01.16 Jesse No. 01:08.90 Jesse Ah, also I just want to clarify for listeners of this. We're not laughing because of the girl getting killed. We're laughing because this seems very strange to put into the paper without any other context. 01:15.57 Jesus of Nayarit Um, it is very strange. 01:20.83 Shane Yeah, so this goes back to like the quality of the journal thing I don't think I've ever seen a sentence like that like an ah like that feels I don't want to say off color but just seems bizarre to kind of have that sentence in there amongst all the other things that are in this piece. 01:35.95 Jesus of Nayarit Maybe they were in the truck. Um I Just assume it was some a woman's sun bathing but it could have been a man. Let's just say ah them was in the truck that was going over the mound like they're trying to ramp it and maybe they fell off the truck and that's what happened because otherwise like. Either way, why does that lead to the protection of the mounds because it was soaked in blood but I don't know. 01:56.83 archpodnet And she was run over though. They they say that though in the article she was run over so I don't think she just got like yeed out of it So I don't. 02:05.67 Jesus of Nayarit M. Either way doesn't bode Well for the mountains. Would you find a journal article on it. News. 02:11.95 Shane Um. 02:14.83 Jesse Or the paper. 02:15.22 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 02:16.46 Shane I've done it. 02:23.31 Shane Yeah, ah several well I found oh I oh newspaper article driver in Lsu Indian mound death placed on probation. You can who we see it it you get. Probation for running somebody over oh my god the driver of a car that struck and killed a co-ed on the indian mounds at Lsu was put on 2 years probation after receiving a Stern lecture from district judge Bob Hester oh 02:53.51 Jesse Um, what. 02:56.74 Shane Boy charged with reckless operation of a motor vehicle What you did was Childish foolish act of gross negligence. 03:06.87 Jesse Wait I want to make sure that I understand Shane this person was given a Stern lecture and 2 years probation for killing another human. Okay. 03:07.78 archpodnet That's manslaughter right. 03:08.24 Shane You would hate. 03:17.20 Shane Yes, so he told he told the the guy that the greatest penalty he would face would be his own conscious because he would have to live with the fact that a young girl was killed because of his action. It was in November and oh. 03:32.46 Jesus of Nayarit Where he's up to nowadays. 03:34.96 Shane Um, baing in November all right 1984 that had a smoke in another student we're sitting atop the mo on a car driven by Mullen veered up the hill and struck and killed her. Wow. 03:50.72 Shane What a weird rabbit hole to go down on an archaeological article about the oldest mounds in the Americas. 03:51.32 Jesus of Nayarit Tam. 03:56.43 Jesse Well, it's not really all that much archeology in here anyways. 04:00.75 archpodnet Yeah I feel like I feel I feel like everyone can notice that we're avoiding the subject of it a little bit because it's It's kind of ridiculous I mean there's many critiques of this paper and I feel like we can start with the lack of. 04:02.45 Shane They are. 04:04.58 Jesus of Nayarit Um, oh. 04:15.42 Jesse Um, and. 04:20.45 archpodnet Or if you guys have and any other sort of idea like the lack of archeology in this paper I think that's. 04:25.43 Jesse Well I mean it's kind of a strange one right? because the mounds are inherently archeological inherently built by Native American communities there but the authors of the paper have no apparent background in archeology. They're coming from. 04:27.67 Shane Um. 04:45.11 Jesse Geology and astrophysics and there's no discussion of the archaeology at all. It's just basically talking about the geology and geophysics of the mountains themselves. 04:47.72 Jesus of Nayarit Her. 05:01.10 Shane Um I remember seeing these guys give a paper at this like the like every ah everyone's while Mississippi and Louisiana have like joint state meetings I remember so I vaguely remember watching them give a paper on this. And I'm wanting to think they were trying to argue then that it was younger dries in age because I think maybe they had osl dates or something um, and now it's early holocene in age because they got radiocarbon dates. Um, don't hold me to that several years ago. Um. 05:30.15 Jesse Well Shane it's funny. You say that because they start the paper by saying that mound b dates to the younger dryus but explicitly say the younger dryus ends at 11700 and that Mb. . was initially constructed about eleven thousand so like this doesn't really line up at all so it sounds like part of this maybe is a leftover from that presentation that you're talking about and then they just kind of added some. 05:47.68 Shane Um, yeah. 06:04.44 Jesse Paragraphs to it later on. 06:06.71 Shane Yeah, ah, I mean there's certain things here that like whenever I went through and I like caught my eye like the guy who did the original study that they referenced Hamburg Hamburg is a soil scientist I've met a musical dude. He actually I think he works for Sri in Tucson the southwest. So um, like a really good geoareologist like soils guy and so he did the initial studies of the cores at basically a show that that they were built quickly which is not out of the norm because that's what Watson break seems like it was built quickly and it's not out of the norm. To see that before they build a mound they set fire to the vegetation. So. It's not out of the ordinary to see ash at the bottom. Um, and you got to think if it's like bamboo that is growing. There is a lot of bioturbation. That's an older surface so that apparently they're built on um plesocene terraces covered in bamboo that they burnt. They got really hot if you've ever seen the floor of a bamboo for it. It's covered with. Dry bits and pieces of bamboo that fall off. So it's not crazy that you would get a hot fire if you like torched a whole bunch of bamboo as you're like trying to clean this surface off so you can build them out none of that's out of the ordinary or crazy. It's just their interpretation of the dates. 07:35.42 Shane I don't if it went through american antiquity. Um, first thing we can talk about is those set of radiocarbon days which I've never seen anybody feel like they had to go through the need to explain what a sigma symbol was in Greek they did that they're like this symbol being standard deviation. It means this. And I'm not exactly sure that their definition of what a standard deviation on a radiocarbon date means is actually accurate I wish Carlton was here because I have a feeling Carlton would be like I don't think that's what that means? Um, but that table I think screams. 08:13.11 Shane Geologist doing archaeology and not archeologists trying to date a mound to me what it I think it's the bread and butter of this article is that table of dates. 08:21.52 Jesse Yeah, definitely. 08:22.75 Jesus of Nayarit Ah. 08:26.48 Jesse Yeah, and you know it's it's a combination of things I think that that stood out to me was that table with the radiocarbon dates but to actually understand the context of them then you had to. Refer back to a different figure figure 11 which takes a minute to to understand I mean I and it it's an interesting approach that they made to try to piece together where all of these different. Layers of mound building were occurring and when they're occurring but you're really having to kind of pull information from one to the other instead of what we're accustomed to in archeology with a nice simple table with lab numbers. Ages standard deviation aligned in stratigraphic order and information about what's actually being dated and I know they include that on here they talk about if it's vitals or charcoal organic sediment. But when you really dive into their discussion of that. They're talking about dates that are mixed samples. They're talking about dates that are not just pure phtiist samples or charcoal samples. But they actually say in. Ah, 1 instance that this particular radiocarbon age comes from phists with. 10:01.19 Jesse Bone mixed into that sample so they're they're mixed samples that are coming from different um, different materials which is to me a huge red flag I mean that's that's kind of one of the first things that that we're ever taught as archeologists in grad school is. Don't date mix samples because you're dating multiple things. 10:22.79 Shane And I think that Also yeah, that's the animal. Yeah. 10:22.81 archpodnet Yeah, yeah, and that yeah and that that that figure that you're sorry, go ahead. 10:22.89 Jesus of Nayarit A final with this is plant material right? just for the audience. Yeah, okay. Was that. 10:34.14 Shane Um, Idol lists are like the inorganic parts of plants. Yeah. 10:36.75 archpodnet Yeah, and so that figure he's talking about has time on the x- axis and then depth on the y axis and then there's some sort of so spatial or some it's it's it's wild wait when it's like it screams like age devmod. Age depth modeling is something you should do run it through r run it through anything that we do now today and and Carlton would be able to talk to this more about age depth modeling and and kind of trying to figure out strata graphic stuff using. Different programs to kind of guess in between what happens and that's not shown here. That's kind of it's kind of this wild figure that still hurts my brain as I'm looking at it. 11:27.35 Shane That would be the first thing if the if this this came across my inbox for peer review. The first thing I would ask is where is your bayesian modeling where is your bathing modeling to give us beginning and end phase dates. Um with. 11:35.53 Jesse Right. 11:44.59 Shane Some kind of confidence and whether whether or not you've got this model correctly and to help us identify which dates are anomalous or not like that standard practice. It's been practiced for a while like this since. Ah. The first time I ever saw somebody do it and do it really like in a cool interesting way was watching at a seaiac I watched Tim Shilling do his early bazing modeling of the dates for the construction of monk's mound at cohokia. So he had all these days from all these cores and he put them all together and ran this bayesium model I wass figured all right? This was built in this is built in since then it's like widespread use whenever people are modeling deficit particularly of mounds because mounds um, and I'm like where where is this where is. Where is this like um, how do we know which ones that your cherry like it screams a little cherry picking to like say here's the ones we like and down here at the bottom here's our anomalous ones without any statistical rigor. 12:44.18 Jesse Yeah, exactly. Yeah I mean they they just come out and say that they're removing a number of dates because they don't think that the ages line up with the stratographic position. Why did they pick those particular dates to throw out and say that are anomalous versus the other ones right? And that's the whole reason why Bayesian analysis is now all of the rage for these types of archaeological questions and problems that are based on you know this. Time depth sequence. 13:25.40 Shane So I compare and contrast this a little bit with like um there is a ph d student at wash you two of them Seth grooms and Grace Ward and they I think Seth won the student paper prize last do you remember Jesse last year the cx student paper prize was that Seth one to think it was Seth and so what he did was like this great presentation that is like here's a sequence of steps. Not only did he like. 13:44.21 Jesse I Can't remember off the top of my head. 13:57.44 Shane Here's all my like in-depth soils data here's my course here's my reconstruction. All these units here's the pictures here's the dates here's the modeling. But then like walked you through like here's the narrative of how these things were constructed. It was easy to follow and it made sense and it was intuitive and um that to me was like had everything you'd want to like make the case and in that case it was a really interesting finding because you had poverty point. Which is this big Kahuna mound site. It's a unesco world heritage site and people assume that the site across across the Mississippi River in Northern Mississippi called jaketown was kind of like an outlier. To poverty point that it was like something where these poverty point people may have been living one of these places they may have been coming from and coming to poverty poverty point for the the big poverty point party what he actually found is those sites at those mounds at jaketownpredatepottery ah poverty point. And so it's like a great way of this is how you construct a convincing argument that a site is older than how you think it is when you're dealing with these archaic mounts and ah it doesn't seem like a lot of that stuff that Seth and Grace had at jaketown is in this. The other thing I would ask is. 15:19.77 Shane Where's your particle size analysis. Where's your soil descriptions. Where's your micromorphology like a lot of what we know about mountains now and if there's a great article if you are in archeology and you're in southeaster archeology. There's an article that tr kidter and Sarah Sherwood wrote called the da vincis of dirt and they kind of put their stuff together. Talk about like mound buildinging through time and how you do geowork on a mound. Um and make a case like Sarah's got like really detailed examples of like shiloh mounds where like. They're patching the mounds after they erode with sod turned upside down and they've picked out insects and earthworms and stuff cause there's no class from that so I'm like we can do a lot of really in-depth stuff and it's just not in this. I'm like okay where is it where this is what I need to be convinced and it's not there is that a winded answer. Ah yeah. 16:18.50 archpodnet And they also know that that that's great and they spend a lot of time talking about part of their argument is that there are these like consistent fires that burned and that they're of Human origin so they spent a lot of time talking about. 16:36.73 Jesus of Nayarit Ah. 16:36.81 archpodnet Magnetics I'm gonna fuck mess up this word magnetic susceptibility and Wow Um, and those methods but it seems like they're not at and answering the bigger question and they not. 16:39.56 Shane Um, you nailed it. 16:56.10 archpodnet Doing doing the analysis that we want to see where we want to see the things These things are proved before you start talking about the use of fire before you before you start talking about ceremonialism even as part of this that's kind of something they've added to it which is. 17:09.63 Shane A. 17:14.34 archpodnet Very sketchy to me and. 17:14.55 Jesse Well I don't know if we have time in this segment or not. But yeah I have some thoughts on why we have these archaeological questions that remain about this. 17:16.36 Shane It's been a minute. 17:16.63 Jesus of Nayarit And just ah here. 17:25.90 Jesus of Nayarit Well Jesse let's take that up in the next segment.