Middle Archaic earthen mound complexes in the lower Mississippi valley are remote antecedents of the famous but much younger Poverty Point earthworks. Watson Brake is the largest and most complex of these early mound sites. Very extensive coring and stratigraphic studies, aided by 25 radiocarbon dates and six luminescence dates, show that minor earthworks were begun here at ca. 3500 B.C. in association with an oval arrangement of burned rock middens at the edge of a stream terrace. The full extent of the first earthworks is not yet known. Substantial moundraising began ca. 3350 B.C. and continued in stages until some time after 3000 B.C. when the site was abandoned. All 11 mounds and their connecting ridges were occupied between building bursts. Soils formed on some of these temporary surfaces, while lithics, fire-cracked rock, and fired clay/loam objects became scattered throughout the mound fills. Faunal and floral remains from a basal midden indicate all-season occupation, supported by broad-spectrum foraging centered on nuts, fish, and deer. All the overlying fills are so acidic that organics have not survived. The area enclosed by the mounds was kept clean of debris, suggesting its use as ritual space. The reasons why such elaborate activities first occurred here remain elusive. However, some building bursts covary with very well-documented increases in El Niño/Southern Oscillation events. During such rapid increases in ENSO frequencies, rainfall becomes extremely erratic and unpredictable. It may be that early moundraising was a communal response to new stresses of droughts and flooding that created a suddenly more unpredictable food base.

Over the past 30 years or so, some fascinating new developments have taken place in a field that is now called “nonlinear science.” These developments have been of such magnitude that historian Alan Beyerchen concluded “There is every reason to believe that the westernized world is in the early stages of an intellectual transformation of major proportions, perhaps as significant as the emergence of the modern worldview in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.”

These new developments are rooted in work conducted by mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré around the turn of the century. He carried out some calculations regarding planetary orbits and demonstrated the possibility of erratic or “chaotic” dynamical behavior. What is particularly interesting about such behavior is that it is exhibited by deterministic systems, that is, systems that have no stochastic (noisy) character of any kind. Little was done with Poincaré's findings until the 1960s when new work in nonlinear science, based on numerical models, led to the discovery of amazingly complex behavior that can be exhibited even by very simple deterministic systems. Since that time, the discipline has grown enormously and has been applied in practically every area of science and engineering, as well as in other diverse areas such as the financial market, political science, economics, and even Adlerian psychology.