Across the world, prehistoric cultures have marked the landscape with monuments expressed as mounds, circles, and ditches. Anthropologists frequently interpret these structures in light of their astronomical or religious focus, but recent research by Lynne Kelly has argued for a more pragmatic function. It turns out, cultures transitioning from nomadism to full-time agriculture across the world have created fantastically large structures — often, they make the most sense if seen from a bird’s-eye view. Poverty Point, in northeastern Louisiana, is one such example. The culture that created it flourished from 1700-1100 BCE, and an artist’s rendition of it appears here. Kelly argues that such peoples built these monuments as a sophisticated method of tracking highly specific knowledge – a concrete expression of “memory palaces” that enable the survival of information vital to a community to be preserved. Such information might include complicated time-keeping methods, or geographical knowledge, or even lists of flora and fauna.
Source(s): Check out Kelly’s _Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies_ for more on this subject.
