Monuments mark the rise of social complexity worldwide.
Watson Brake, an arrangement of human-made mounds located in the floodplain of the Ouachita River near Monroe in northern Louisiana, consists of an oval formation of eleven mounds from three to twenty-five feet tall, connected by ridges to form an oval nearly nine hundred feet across.
Its beginnings have been dated to about fifty-four hundred years ago (approximately the thirty-fifth century BCE).
Considered the earliest mound complex in North America, Watson Brake is the earliest dated, complex construction in the Americas.
The discovery and dating of Watson Brake demonstrated that the pre-agricultural, pre-ceramic, indigenous cultures within the territory of the present-day United States were much more complex than previously thought.
