Why Ancient Americans Moved Millions of Tons of Earth

He walks through the monumental earthwork sites scattered across North America, from Cahokia along the Mississippi to Emerald Mound and Newark, Ohio. These were not simple settlements. They were enormous complexes requiring the movement of millions of tons of earth, built by cultures that predated European contact. The scale alone demands explanation. Why invest that kind of labor? Why choose earth over stone when both require coordinated effort across generations? He points out that dozens of these sites once existed, many now lost or overlooked. The question isn't whether ancient peoples could move earth, it's why they felt compelled to do it on such a massive scale, and what that tells us about their cosmology, their understanding of the landscape, and their relationship to cycles we may have forgotten.