We are continuing to pursue the first people in our area from pre-historic time. Archaeologists have developed a significant record from artifacts. History is not static. The history of these Original Americans has not been written.

One of our objectives of the archaeology sites survey was to understand how they migrated, when, and why they went where they did. As research scientists, it is not always necessary to observe data first hand. However, first-hand allows collection of data that others may not have caught. That really played out on this excursion.

We visited dozens of ziggurats and mounds, some minor and some reaching to the heavens. Many comprise walled civilizations with ridges connecting towers.

What is one thing in common for all the locations? They were near a major navigable river or bayou, built just outside the major floodplain of the Mississippi River delta. When we say near, that is generally less than 100 feet. The fact that close has not been flooded and destroyed in 5 or 6,000 years is further testament to the engineering skill of these people.

We travelled the confluence of the rivers to the Gulf to determine why the Original People selected their locations. The development and migration became crystal clear. That is part of the continuing saga.

The region is the Mississippi River delta, a flat land of a hundred or so miles wide along the great river. Well-accepted observation of the region is that flooding through history created an unbelievably rich, fertile landscape now covered by huge farms of corn, cotton, and rice.

The mound settlements are along an elevated landform between bayous. The ridges have no natural stones, only occasional gravel. Consequently, the ziggurats were earthen dirt works that have survived 6,000 years. What road, levee or other similar structures of the last couple of hundred years have survived as well?

After a while my co-author made an astute observation. In this flat country, if there is a hillock, it is likely a mound. As it turned out, she was quite prescient.

Poverty Point is on Macon ridge along Bayou Macon with an elevation of 95 feet above sea level. The much older Watson Brake on the Ouachita River is about 50 elevation. The locations are about 275-miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, so what would be much of the surrounding scape? Interminable, impenetrable, incredible swamps with bayous flowing into some of the largest rivers fathomable.

There is but one way to travel, by water along the major rivers. They assuredly did not walk beside them through the swamps and across the myriad bayous. We will see, based on archaeology dating and coring of sites that the people travelled up and down the swift flowing rivers on a routine basis. But how?

We know unquestionably they did not travel overland. That traditional hypothesis is just not possible. They did not travel down the Mississippi. That would involve going far downstream, coming back up another river for hundreds of miles to make the first major settlement. That hypothesis is just not reasonable.

They appeared to enter the Mississippi Basin, likely along the Red River, now Atchafalaya, which is a major alternate channel of the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi is so wide and dispersed that finding a channel is near impossible. The privateer Jean Lafitte survived in the backwaters below New Orleans because of that challenge. Even today, navigation of ocean liners to the Great River is tedious.

Just a few miles west of the numerous Mississippi outflows is the Atchafalaya River, the fifth largest river in North America by discharge. It is five times larger than the Arkansas into the Mississippi.

In our prehistory time of interest, this channel was the flow of our own Red River on its way to the Gulf. By Corps of Engineers estimates, about 500 years ago the unbelievably huge Mississippi in one of its meanderings cut a channel which allowed comingling of the Red and Mississippi in the near flat terrain of the eastern Louisiana swamps.

From that point about 30% of the flow of the Mississippi eventually diverted down the Red River. The upper part of the Red became a tributary of the Mississippi and the lower portion of the Red became a distributary. Massive earth works, flood control, spillways, and diversionary management has kept the Mississippi from rerouting down the Atchafalaya River, bypassing Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Erosion continues, nature always wins.

In 1831, early settlers to the Louisiana Purchase found steamboats had difficulty penetrating the morass until Captain Henry Shreve commanded the construction of a canal to make a more navigable path from the Mississippi up the Red. That affront to nature caused more water diversion.

There are no locks on the 130ish mile long Atchafalaya, so the river is unbelievably fast. Think about the River. It is simply the renamed Red River which drains the southwest from the arid high-plains of the Texas Panhandle to the Gulf. That is a lot of water is an understatement.

We tracked the confluence of every major river from the Ouachita by Watson Brake to confluence with the Tensas to form the Black. Next came the confluence with the Red. Then the confluence with Old River and conversion to Atchafalaya.

The hypothesis that best fits the data is that the Original Americans migrated up from the Gulf. Going upstream along the path just outlined, the Original Migrants took the largest fork every time.

Think about the year is 3600 BCE: Why did the Originals settle along the Ouachita, then progressively the Tensas and Red Rivers? How did the Originals migrate up the swift rivers?