[HN Gopher] Archaeologists dig up 1,400-year-old Native American...
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Archaeologists dig up 1,400-year-old Native American canal in
Alabama
Author : samizdis
Score : 151 points
Date : 2022-10-10 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| rob74 wrote:
| > _But when the canal was dry, it still would have made a good
| footpath through a heavily forested area, Waselkov says._
|
| I bet the canal would spend a pretty long time in an intermediary
| state - not deep enough for canoes, but not dry enough to use as
| a footpath. But maybe there was a footpath _beside_ the canal, as
| there are for more modern canals (towpaths)?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Canoes are useful in very shallow water even if the people have
| to get out.
|
| It's much easier to float a canoe while walking next to it than
| it is to carry it.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| How about 4-inch mud?
| kijin wrote:
| I bet canoes make decent sleds on slippery mud.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| It depends a lot on the mud.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've had my canoe in weeds so thick the bottom wasn't
| even touching water, but I could push my paddle through
| and not touch bottom.
|
| Canoes make acceptable sleds in some situations.
| bburrito wrote:
| There is tons of stuff out there. Its a thing in construction
| that you dont have to worry about anything archaeological below X
| feet because X represents the lowest we have found human
| remains(Clovis). But everybody involved with digging has stories
| about finding stuff way below that layer. And they just cover it
| up because nobody wants the job to be stopped.
| INTPenis wrote:
| But wait; "a canal, nearly a mile long, built for canoe travel".
| Isn't it relatively easy to carry a canoe for a mile? Especially
| in those days when they were a lot tougher. Why dig a canal just
| to float canoes one mile?
|
| Makes me think it was used to float heavier stuff, like goods,
| wood, maybe even stone. Or for irrigation.
| elil17 wrote:
| Well you don't just send a canoe for the heck of it. You put
| the goods, wood, or stone into the canoe.
| Milner08 wrote:
| They were not building it for people going out for a
| recreational canoe. They would surely have stuff in the Canoe
| that they don't want to carry a mile along with the canoe.
| devilbunny wrote:
| A modern aluminum canoe, or a hide-covered one, sure. A dugout,
| which is implied in the article, not so much. And, as you say,
| if transporting goods it would have been much less work. No
| pack animals, so everything was moved by human power.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I expect that the people who dug this canal _did_ carry
| dugout canoes over this same route. Knowing the alternative
| can strongly motivate you to make the improvement.
| TSiege wrote:
| If you read the article more carefully you'd see that area in
| question was a marsh, making it difficult to carry. It was only
| used in wetter seasons. And the people who lived there did not
| practice agriculture
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Well if you're traveling you'd have a canoe full of supplies
| which may not be so easy to carry.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| How about dropping logs into it and pulling them along. Beats
| wheels!
| eesmith wrote:
| If they are a lot tougher, then wouldn't they also find it
| easier to build a canal?
| fsloth wrote:
| It's interesting that while South-American pre-colombian
| construction projects are familiar to many (such as Aztec cities
| and Nazca Lines, etc), it is perhaps not as well known that
| North-American pre-columbian populations had massive civil
| engineering projects as well e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point
|
| I wonder why the latter are not as well known.
| altacc wrote:
| I've read a bit around this topic and a rather plausible
| explanation is that in North America, the European settler
| mentality was that the north was all empty land. Acknowledging
| the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands,
| etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of
| ownership of the land. It was much more convenient to declare
| the native Americans as barbarians with little culture &
| society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European
| settlers. Inaccurate societal tropes about native Americans
| still persist today and education about their history is still
| lacking.
|
| South America was more populated but also the European tactic
| was of conquest of the natives, not total eradication &
| displacement (although they did an effective job at those as
| well).
| sho_hn wrote:
| "1491" is a most fantastic book about all of this.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| There was an article written by the author of 1491 in the
| Atlantic that is a great abbreviated version of the book
| for anyone interested:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/3
| 0...
| nkingsy wrote:
| Relevant to this question is the story of Cortez and his
| pigs. Spain immediately set up shop in South America,
| giving us plenty of stories of vast civilizations, but
| Cortez made just one minor expedition across Florida and
| did report large cities, but only the pigs and their
| disease stayed behind.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities,
| farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient
| subject of ownership of the land.
|
| I am highly skeptical of these types of sentiments. They are
| simply projections of modern sensibilities to the period of
| European settlement.
|
| At the time, might by right was the default in Europe, with
| near constant wars of conquest. outside of Europe, entire
| islands in the Caribbean were enslaved and depopulated.
|
| Given this context, I don't think information about Native
| American towns was suppressed to protect the delicate
| sensibilities of the settlers.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Then why in every case did they need to portray locals as
| barbarians when they knew the opposite was true?
| MockObject wrote:
| > It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans
| as barbarians with little culture & society and the land
| unused and open to be claimed by European settlers.
|
| Wikipedia says:
|
| "The loss of the population [due to disease] was so high that
| it was partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as
| "virgin wilderness". By the time significant European
| colonization was underway, native populations had already
| been reduced by 90%. This resulted in settlements vanishing
| and cultivated fields being abandoned. Since forests were
| recovering, the colonists had an impression of a land that
| was an untamed wilderness."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep.
| ..
| krapp wrote:
| And yet the phrase "merciless Indian Savages" is literally
| in the Declaration of Independance.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What exactly does that illustrate about settlements in
| North America?
|
| Of course the Colonists knew that Native Americans
| existed. They interacted with them constantly.
| krapp wrote:
| That the United States saw Native Americans in the way
| that altacc described above, an "inferior" race whom
| Europeans had a God-given right to conquer and subdue.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think anyone was arguing contrary to the idea
| that settlers had both the means and motive to conquer
| and subdue the natives.
| kodah wrote:
| > It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans
| as barbarians with little culture & society and the land
| unused and open to be claimed by European settlers.
|
| I went to a US public school in the South and also went to a
| private school. We spent most semesters of history learning
| about Native American civilizations, construction, and at one
| point had to build small-scale physical replicas of their
| cities.
|
| That's to say, I don't really buy your explanation for the
| broader US. Maybe specific pockets. What I do think is more
| likely is that people believe that warring kingdoms were
| still normal back then and view Native American tribes as
| just that - kingdoms that were conquered. That much I can
| live with, but the constant lying and taking back promises we
| made to the Native Americans is absolute trash and should be
| rectified.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Cities, yeah? Big ones? I know of mesoamerican cities like
| Tenochtitlan but I am unaware of any north american Indian
| cities (to be fair, I'm not from the USA), so some pointers
| would be very welcome indeed.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Here are two:
|
| https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cahokia-mounds-state-
| histor...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Hi
| sto...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| And in the north, nothing can go much earlier than the last
| time glaciers ground everything to dust.
| [deleted]
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Much of it was deliberately destroyed and obscured. Large parts
| of Cahokia were destroyed by highway and suburban development,
| and it wasn't that city planners and officials didn't know it
| was there. They often suppressed discoveries and tried to cut
| archaeologists out of the loop, because the artifacts and etc
| were in the way of development goals.
|
| Many North American cities were built on top of or near where
| native settlements were. It was in the best interests of
| colonials and moderns to suppress or diminish findings.
|
| That and North Americans were engaged in a long running
| cultural genocide based on a mission of Christianizing a
| 'primitive' people, which would have been undermined by
| recognizing this area as previously occupied by a settled
| agricultural societies.
|
| https://www.amazon.ca/Cahokia-Ancient-Americas-Great-Mississ...
| is a great book on this topic written by an archaeologist who
| spent much of his life working around Cahokia. And he gets into
| this issue at length.
| tomcam wrote:
| There was no long-running cultural genocide. There was tons
| of unintentional spreading of disease, which of course had a
| similar effect.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I believe you're confusing "genocide" and "cultural
| genocide." You can argue there was no long running
| genocide, but it's very hard to deny things like
| residential schools or forced child abduction aren't
| cultural genocide.
| tomcam wrote:
| I was confusing them, and I agree with your assessment.
| Thank you.
| krapp wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars
|
| There were both. The effect of European filth and disease -
| both intentional (smallpox blankets) and not - preceding a
| policy of cultural genocide.
| tomcam wrote:
| Smallpox blankets is an urban legend. And with good
| reason. It would be impossible to control the effects,
| plus their knowledge of germ theory was limited anyway.
|
| https://www.historynet.com/smallpox-in-the-blankets/
| krapp wrote:
| Ok. But Andrew Jackson definitely wasn't an urban legend.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Is also worth noting that Cahokia was abandoned 150 years
| before Columbus landed in North America. That by itself
| goes a long way and explaining why explorers didn't find
| such massive cities
| stephenhuey wrote:
| Several years ago I visited the Cahokia museum and went on
| top of a large mound with a St. Louis native who had only
| barely heard of it even though it's just across the
| Mississippi River from the main part of the city. I'm hoping
| they're able to dig up a lot of interesting finds before I
| visit again someday.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I think the reasons are fairly obvious.
|
| People remember great centralized empires. They remember
| societies with extensive written records. Cultures that
| impressed their conquerors. Areas with contiguity of
| centralized civilization. Monuments that are noteworthy on the
| global scale. When those things are missing, past societies
| fade into obscurity.
|
| Even in Europe, ancient cultures are mostly remembered from
| their interactions with Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern
| societies. European history effectively begins with the spread
| of Greco-Roman influence, which in many cases was well into the
| middle ages. Whatever there was before is now mostly forgotten.
| shipman05 wrote:
| If you want to build to last, build with stone.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I think I get what you are saying and certainly not trying to
| compare you to this horrible villain...
|
| but whenever I hear that sentiment I am usually reminded of
| this quote from Judge Holden in Blood Meridian:
|
| "What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many.
| The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The
| old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease
| or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages
| since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and
| ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the
| art, the building -- these things stand in judgement on the
| latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with.
| The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander
| these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their
| crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear
| seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a
| lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of
| nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is
| entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same
| weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of
| reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny
| of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud
| with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter
| the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons
| however primitive their works may seem to us."
|
| For what it's worth, I live in the four corners area of the
| US and regularly see stone buildings that are hundreds of
| years old out in the desert, and the structure I live in is
| made of wood.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Wood lasts essentially forever in the southwest. We have
| dendrochronological records going back thousands of years
| from the Colorado plateau because there's so little decay.
| There just wasn't much of it to build with out there by the
| classic period, so they relied more on abundant stone
| rather than trying to drag more timbers than strictly
| necessary the tens of kilometers from where they grew to
| where pueblos were built.
|
| You probably know this as well, but for those that don't,
| the Anasazi are typically called "Ancestral puebloans" in
| modern literature because it's been well established that
| they didn't actually go anywhere, they're pretty direct
| ancestors of the modern puebloan nations (among others).
| bokohut wrote:
| A simple and concise statement backed by undeniable proof
| found in monuments around the world of which some modern man
| still cannot explain as we continue to discover such
| artifacts as our technology aided exploration expands. My
| additional comments to this comes from personal experience in
| this arena in the last decade of my own local discoveries
| that are directly linked to Native and Paleo occupation on
| the land of which I live and the surrounding area. Over ten
| years ago now I found my first artifact laying on the surface
| behind my house and in that time I have done hundreds of
| hours of research and well over a thousand hours of walking
| in which I have discovered many artifacts to date. Several
| accredited individuals and organizations have visited my
| location to see my finds as I attempt to get the surrounding
| areas studied for preservation from what the experts have
| informed me on my collection. As with anything however
| someone must take up the preservation battle and while I
| continue to discover items weekly my professional background
| is not in artifacts nor land preservation. I'll close with
| another statement for one to ponder just as shipman05 did:
| Nearly everything humans have created that is no longer
| needed either gets buried by another human or by nature in
| time.
| tomcam wrote:
| Wait, you're not going to tell us what artifacts you found
| or what country you're in? You're killing me here!
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| I spoke with an archaeologist and interpreter recently at an
| archaeological park with mounds from the Mississippian people
| period. They said that the archaeological park might have
| easily been dozed over if events had turned out differently. I
| suspect that North American pre-columbian construction is often
| obscured by a century of modern development and centuries of
| farming now. Much of what might have been is now crushed under
| our tractors or buried under our malls, highways, and houses. I
| wonder what people living here before us were like and what
| lessons they might teach us.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Native Americans aren't gone, they're just quite a bit less
| populous post-colonization. You can still find nations like
| the Natchez and the Choctaw whose ancestors built mounds and
| ask them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_people
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Indeed speaking in the past tense about indigenous
| Americans is a long standing artifact of colonial ideology
| which has the effect of diminishing the present day reality
| of natives on this land. I was fairly recently shocked upon
| a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NY where plaque
| upon plaque in the section about pacific NW peoples spoke
| about the Haida and related people in the past tense and
| proudly displayed what were in all likelihood stolen
| artifacts.
|
| My son was sent home with homework a couple years ago that
| spoke about the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe etc) all in past tense
| grammar. Meanwhile we have close family friends who are
| Ojibwe.
|
| In Canada at least there has been a bit of a reversal in
| this trend, with more recognition of the present day
| nations. And in fact there's actually demographic growth
| among many first nations here, while the broader European
| settler derived society is in a demographic decline (solved
| only by immigration).
| gen220 wrote:
| Situations like these, with the right teacher, are great
| eye-opening moments for children.
|
| I still remember a unit in US history, in which we were
| asked to write an essay expounding on the evolving nature
| of woman's role in American society from the antebellum
| period through reconstruction (1820s-1890s).
|
| I think just about everybody in the class interpreted the
| question as being one about "white" women, and wrote
| their essays accordingly.
|
| The next lecture opened with this meta-fact, and rather
| than shame us about it, she used it as a wedge to open a
| discussion on how the overwhelming majority of writing on
| American history is authored from a male, generally
| Western European lens.
|
| Most of our essays told of monotonically expanding rights
| and freedom (Seneca Falls was in 1848, the various
| feminist movements were gaining steam at the state level
| around property rights and suffrage). But this time
| period saw Indigenous women undergo the Trail of Tears
| and the institutionalization of reservations and forced
| relocation. It also saw enslaved women experience
| Emancipation only to be followed with the failure of
| reconstruction and the installment of Jim Crow.
|
| ---
|
| This was over 10 years ago, and I still remember the
| lesson in so much detail! And find it useful when reading
| history today. Every time we uncover a blind spot and
| cure some ignorance, we're making progress.
| tomcam wrote:
| > what were in all likelihood stolen artifacts.
|
| Or... purchased? Is there reason to believe in one vs.
| the other?
| lflfldksb wrote:
| > And in fact there's actually demographic growth among
| many first nations here, while the broader European
| settler derived society is in a demographic decline
| (solved only by immigration).
|
| That's what really would be best, you know, if those
| whites would get off that stolen land and give it back to
| the Natives, you know?
|
| I mean, there's just a connection between the historical
| homeland of a certain People and their blood that just
| shouldn't be violated, right? Demographically justice
| will be done when America is inhabited primarily by those
| who are Indigenous and have a right to the land.
| Descendents of Colonials should be removed and sent back
| to their historical homeland to make room for the
| Natives.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Seems you're new here. But your tone looks more
| appropriate for Reddit or Twitter. You'll probably find
| better strawmen to beat up on over there, while you pound
| your chest for upvotes.
| [deleted]
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think straightforwardly the Nazca lines are totally unique
| and pyramids of Mexico are undeniable in their impressiveness.
| Poverty Point and the mounds are mistakable as weird hills, and
| were mostly uninhabited by the time settlers arrived.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Many iconic Mexican pyramids were also weird hills before
| they were excavated and restored in the 20th century and
| similarly unused. Here's one example [1]. Even major cities
| like Tikal were essentially unknown until systematic mapping
| of the areas around the more obvious pyramids revealed their
| true extents.
|
| [1]: https://i.redd.it/jj7y8vn3lir51.png
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yea that's true but Europeans wrote detailed accounts of
| the structures at their apogee, documenting their use and
| the culture of their builders. We'll, at least in some
| places.
| prepend wrote:
| I assume it's because the SA construction projects are more
| visible today than NA projects. Nazca lines are still visible
| along with Inca and Maya stone buildings. NA mounds and these
| canals are not as visible so people just can't see them and
| walk around them as well.
| spinlock wrote:
| South America was also much more populous than North America.
| I suspect we weren't as successful at eliminating
| stouthearted americas culture.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's kind of unclear. It's also possible that because of
| the _slower_ exploration and settlement of North America,
| we simply never saw the large societies before they
| collapsed from disease (especially true of the
| Mississippian cultures) -- Europeans only came through in
| force a hundred years later.
| spinlock wrote:
| It's so unclear. There's so much we don't know about
| America it's pretty insane.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The north American equivalent of the Nazca lines (the Blythe
| intaglios [1]) are just as visible, simply not as numerous
| and importantly, they don't have a decades-long presence in
| the public mind as an enduring archaeological mystery.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| It's probably because the biggest at Blythe Intaglios is
| about 50 meters across, while some of the Nazcal Line
| figures are more than a kilometer across. The former seems
| like something a handful of people could plausibly do on a
| whim as a hobby, while the latter seems like something that
| would require careful planning, maybe some surveying
| techniques, and a lot more energy expenditure and manhours.
| ok_dad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell
|
| This researcher and a small team re-created a method to
| make Nazca lines in the 70's with the same tech that the
| Nazca civilization had. People make very complex crop
| circles all by themselves, too. It's simply a matter of a
| bit of math and careful planning and practice.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Nobody is saying it is impossible, just that it requires
| more interesting explanation. Certainly you would agree?
| ok_dad wrote:
| Not really, no. It wasn't anything crazy like aliens or
| whatever, just humans doing engineering.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| It's a Columbus Day miracle!
| [deleted]
| AlabamaDuneRat wrote:
| Interesting find!
|
| For any non-locals coming across this, the large canal going
| east-west through Mobile and Oyster bay is a recent, man-made
| canal [0]. Linking Bon-Secour river all the way down to Little
| Lagoon at that time would have been a significant improvement in
| ease of access to more abundant fishing grounds.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway
| smitty1e wrote:
| Also known as 'dredging'.
| defrost wrote:
| Digging | establishing a canal is not the same as dedging ..
| one is creating a waterway where previsely there wasn't one,
| the other is removing sediments from an existing waterway |
| lake | harbour.
| elil17 wrote:
| No, this is significant because it's a man made canal, as
| opposed to the natural waterways used for trade that we already
| knew about. It is far longer than the other Native American
| canal we know of and likely had damns to control the flow of
| water through it.
| TSiege wrote:
| It was not dredging. It was a sophisticated structure to
| connect two distinct bodies of water. Per the article > "in its
| heyday it would have stretched a little less than a mile across
| most of Fort Morgan Peninsula, from Oyster Bay in the north to
| Little Lagoon in the south. Both bodies of water are at sea
| level, but the land between reaches up to six feet in
| elevation. That means anyone digging a trench across the
| peninsula would risk draining the water table into those sea-
| level outlets. The solution in this case may have been two dams
| at either end of the passageway that canoe travelers would have
| had to carry their boats around. With a shallow draft, dugout
| canoes would have only needed a few inches of water to pass
| through the three-foot-deep canal."
| kennend3 wrote:
| what point were you trying to make with your half-sentence
| response?
|
| To demonstrate to everyone you don't understand what 'dredging'
| means?
|
| Allow me to google it for you:
|
| Dredging is the removal of sediments and debris from the bottom
| of lakes, rivers, harbors, and other water bodies. It is a
| routine necessity in waterways around the world because
| sedimentation--the natural process of sand and silt washing
| downstream--gradually fills channels and harbors.
|
| what does dredging have to do with the article?
| smitty1e wrote:
| > what point were you trying to make with your half-sentence
| response?
|
| These archaeologists are doing great work, and so my remark
| was kind of a cheap shot and an over-simplification.
|
| But the point still stands.
| prepend wrote:
| I would guess that the canal they built would need dredging
| to stay operational. But I think the discovery is about the
| canal itself not about what they'd have to do to operate the
| canal. Not sure I understand GP's statement but trying to
| find some connection.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This area has had a stable sea level for several thousand years,
| but that's all changing. NOAA predicts a 10-12 inch (25-30 cm)
| sea level rise by 2050 and perhaps 3-4 times that by 2100.
|
| https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
|
| Of course, during the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels were 125
| meters lower (~25,000 - 20,000 years ago), and there's a lot of
| evidence that the Americas were inhabitated by at least small
| human populations by then (although many of their settlements are
| likely now buried by marine sediments).
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