http://www.nps.gov/archeology/feature/feature.htm
Some info about the ancient civilizations of Louisiana. What was going on before Columbus “discovered” America. “Western Civilization” is an oxymoron.
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Yeah, what WERE those mounds all about? There are no good answers from archaeologists, so we’re free to speculate a bit. Possibly, the mounds were used as spatial markers. Could the makers have been creating an extensive ‘cosmogram’? As with tattoos on the body, the original function was healing. The cosmogram is like a landscape tattoo, a way of creating lines or fields where forces can be directed in a ‘propitious’ way. Given the lines, as in Narcisa’s web of lines over our site, locations can be identified as strategic hinges, foci, and danger points. I wonder if the ancient mound-builders had a concept of ‘dark matter’?
I found an interesting book about Mayan calendars over the break. Apparently their calendar was more accurate because it included ALL of the cycles of days/years that make the earth’s clock tick on time. Leave out one of the cycles (one of them is around 155 years!) and you get a calendar that has to be adjusted every now and then, such as ours. Their calendar required observing stars that could be used to calibrate these cycles, and the angles they had to use to measure these stars were like Narcisa’s web: that is, this is space directly related to TIME! I like the general model of overlapping lines in a web that aim to find markers that indicate how the cycles of time interlock. Moving to our situation, we can fantasize a bit about how many times there are (intervals that structure individual and collective ‘life’ as well as those that structure the place) and then think about what points control the observation of these intervals. You’ve got three things: a marker, a background against which the marker is visible and measurable, and a point of view to observe the marker. That’s a lot to think about.