doi:10.1155/2012/192923 Research Article Moving Earth and Building Monuments at the Carson Mounds

Copyright © 2012 Jayur Madhusudan Mehta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The application of combined techniques such as aerial imagery, sediment coring, down-hole magnetic susceptibility, and mechanized trench excavation can provide critical information on landscape formation andmound stratigraphy, specifically if they can be used to understandmound sequences and development. This paper reviews preliminary findings from recent coring and test excavations at the Carsonmounds site (22CO505) in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Aerial imagery assisted in the characterization of a crevasse ridge flood deposit underlying the site and detailed field descriptions of the pedology corroborated its existence. Subsequent sediment coring and trench excavation revealed the nature of flooding in prehistory, indicating that high-intensity floods were responsible for the formation of the crevasse ridge and that lower intensity floods were potentially responsible for interruptions inmound building at the site. This suggests that the Carson settlement was initiated on an actively flooding landform. Down-hole magnetic susceptibility correlated effectively with the pedology; however, it also helped discern anthropogenic surface