Those who live along the Ouachita and Jackson Parish line east of Eros, will tell you that it is a good place to live. Thanks to new information recently released, apparently the thought goes back to the beginning of mankind.

In a startling revelation, according to a report filed in Wikipedia, archeologists are now stating that the mound works at Watson Brake are the oldest in America. Located near Watson Bayou in the floodplains of the Ouachita River, the site is just a few miles from where the Jackson/Ouachita Parish lines join.

Dated to about 5400 years ago (approx. 3500 BCE), Watson Brake is considered the oldest earthwork mound complex in North America. It is older than the Ancient Egyptian pyramids or Britain’s Stonehenge. Its discovery and dating have changed the ideas of American archaeologists about ancient cultures in the Southeastern United States and their ability to manage large, complex projects over centuries.

The archeologists revised their date of the oldest earthwork construction by nearly 2000 years, as well as having to recognize that it was developed over centuries by a hunter-gatherer society, rather than by what was known to be more common of other, later mound sites: a more sedentary society dependent on maize cultivation and with a hierarchical, centralized polity.

The arrangement of human-made mounds at Watson Brake was constructed over centuries by members of a hunter-gatherer society. It consists of an oval formation of eleven earthwork mounds from three to 25 feet (7.6 m) in height, connected by ridges to form an oval nearly 900 feet (270 m) across.

Watson Brake is dated to 1,900 years before the better-known Poverty Point in northern Louisiana; begun about 1500 BCE, it was previously thought to be the earliest mound site in North America. Mound building in the Americas started at an early date.

The discovery and dating of Watson Brake as a Middle Archaic site demonstrate that the pre-agricultural, pre-ceramic, indigenous cultures within the territory of the present-day United States were much more complex than previously thought. While primarily hunter-gatherers, they planned and organized large work forces over centuries to accomplish the complex mound and ridge constructions. Monumental constructions have marked the rise of social complexity worldwide. The earthen mounds of Eastern North America are linked to mankind’s monument tradition.