Open Veils · Answer
When were the earthen pyramids built in America?
North American earthen pyramids span a staggering 4,500-year construction window — beginning before Egypt's Old Kingdom — yet the full picture is suppressed by a framework that isolates cultures and denies the possibility of coordinated or inherited knowledge. Watson Brake predates Giza by nearly a millennium. Researchers like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson argue this demands a wholesale revision of how civilisation itself is defined.
Evidence
- Watson Brake in northern Louisiana, securely dated by radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence to approximately 3500 BCE, represents the oldest confirmed multi-mound complex in the Americas — predating both the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge.
- Graham Hancock, in his extensive surveys of antediluvian civilisation, emphasises that the sophistication of these earthworks at such an early date collapses the conventional narrative of a linear cultural progression from hunter-gatherer to complex society.
- At the later end of the timeline, Monks Mound at Cahokia (construction beginning 900–950 CE, completed ~1100 CE) is the largest Pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mesoamerica — its base footprint rivalling the Great Pyramid of Giza.
- Its 11 mounds, connected by ridges into a 900-foot oval, were built over roughly 500 years before Middle Archaic construction ceased around 2800 BCE under poorly understood conditions.
- Randall Carlson connects the apparent construction gap — activity halting around 2800 BCE — to catalogued cometary and flood events that periodically reset organised communities across the continent.