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Archaeologists dig up 1,400-year-old Native American canal in Alabama
- AlabamaDuneRat 4y agoInteresting 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway
- INTPenis 4y agoBut 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.
- DontchaKnowit 4y agoWell if you're traveling you'd have a canoe full of supplies which may not be so easy to carry.
- elil17 4y agoWell you don’t just send a canoe for the heck of it. You put the goods, wood, or stone into the canoe.
- Milner08 4y agoThey 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 4y agoA 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoIf 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
- raffraffraff 4y agoHow about dropping logs into it and pulling them along. Beats wheels!
- eesmith 4y agoIf they are a lot tougher, then wouldn't they also find it easier to build a canal?
- smitty1e 4y agoAlso known as 'dredging'.
- defrost 4y agoDigging | 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 4y agoNo, 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 4y agoIt 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 4y agowhat 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?
- rob74 4y ago> 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 4y agoCanoes 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 4y agoHow about 4-inch mud?
- kijin 4y agoI bet canoes make decent sleds on slippery mud.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoIt depends a lot on the mud.
- bluGill 4y agoI'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.
- fsloth 4y agoIt'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point I wonder why the latter are not as well known.
- prepend 4y agoI 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.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIt'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 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell 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.
- thisisauserid 4y agoIt's a Columbus Day miracle!
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis 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-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 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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- bburrito 4y agoThere 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.
- midislack 4y agoDon Lancaster's site has info on canals in his neck of the woods.