Word: forded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whenever U.S. archaeologists succeed in extending backwards the length of time that human beings have lived in North America, their European colleagues go them one better. Archaeologist James A. Ford recently reported traces of human settlement in northern Louisiana that he reckons to be 2,700 years old. Last week Professor Alberto Carlo Blanc announced the discovery of man-made tools near Rome "over 200,000 years...
...Ringed City. The U.S. find was at Poverty Point, now on Louisiana's sluggish Bayou Macon. The site has been recognized as man-made for 50 years, but its real character escaped appreciation until Professor Ford got air photos from Army engineers. By 500 B.C., says Ford in Natural History, thousands of Indians or pre-Indians were living at Poverty Point in a carefully laid-out city. They honored their gods by building enormous temple mounds vaguely in the shape of a bird. Six concentric octagons of different-colored soil showed up on the air photos; on closer examination...
...Ford and a crew of local laborers dug deep into Poverty Point. By carbon-14 dating, they determined that the city was first settled about 800 B.C. Its gamehunting people used spear-throwing sticks and bolas (clusters of stone weights). They had a little pottery of poor quality...
Correlating his information, Ford could reconstruct the history of Poverty Point. As early as 10,000 years ago, he says, a very primitive people lived in the region. They left few relics except crude stone weapons. Then, about 1000 B.C., people of superior culture must have come down from the north. They made beautiful flint spearheads, knew how to work copper...
These cultural traits closely resemble those of tribes that lived in Northern Asia several thousand years ago. So Ford thinks that Asians crossed the Bering Strait before the time of Homer and eventually reached Louisiana. They may have conquered the primitives, imposed their religion upon them and forced them to build temples honoring a bird...