We may also employ our archaeological understanding of the mounds in studies of cryptometrology.  We know, for example, that prehistoric mounds were generally not static monuments.  Many of them were active, dynamic features whose size and shape changed significantly through time, and numerous reports have shown active mound construction over much of the occupation of a site.  Mississippian platform mounds with 10 or more stages are not uncommon (Blitz and Livingood 2004).  New stages of mound construction change the heights and shapes of mounds, sometimes over the course of several centuries.  The edges and center points of mounds were therefore not just blurry targets whose precise location is difficult to discern, but moving targets as well.  At what point in a site's history should we expect any particular unit of length to be expressed?  The studies by Sherrod and Rolingson (1987) and Clark (2004), treat the mounds as if the final locations of their edges or center points were the intended goal of the societies who constructed them, who sometimes began the construction hundreds of years before they were completed. 

            Such studies in the Southeast have also failed to explain why certain points on the landscape or within a particular site should express prehistoric units of measurement.  Why would the inhabitants want mounds to be located with their edges or centers set at even and arbitrary increments from one another?  The centers and edges of mounds seem a popular choice of targets among modern researchers, but there is no explanation as to why they would have been so to the people who built the monuments.  Because of the nature of the archaeological record these are the easiest targets for us to measure to and from, even if they are fuzzy and moving targets.  It is easy to see how cryptometrological reasoning can become circular and an exercise in simply trying to find a fit between targets, without considering why they may have been important in the first place.  A passage from Sherrod and Rolingson reveals this tendency.  Reflecting that the TM did not always fit with precision, they write, "The fact that it is not exact may reflect either that the Indians were not concerned with precision or did not have the techniques to make it accurate, or that the modern measurements are not taken at the right places" (1987:44, emphasis added).  In other words, if only we could measure to and from the right places, we would find good fits for the measurement we are looking for.  But how would we know they were the right places?  The reasoning seems to be that we would know because they would be good fits for the measurement we are looking for. 

            Another example comes from Clark (2004), who posits an Archaic period Standard Unit (SU) of 1.666 m, which was combined in multiples of 52 to create the Standard Macro Unit (SMU) of 86.63 m.  Clark uses equilateral triangles drawn onto maps of mound sites to support his conclusions, with the corners and edges of the triangles conforming to features such as "the outer edges of the row of mounds and natural rises along the eastern bluff" (2004:164, at the Caney Mounds complex).  Exactly why these features are significant, and exactly how the location of "natural ridges along the eastern bluff" was determined with sub-meter precision is not explained.  Clark's equilateral triangle drawn on the Caney Mounds site, for example (2004:164, Figure 10.1), is drawn to the upper edge of the natural bluff line that is supposed to define the triangle's northern corner, but near the base of the bluff line on the east.  What would be the significance to the site's inhabitants of the top of the bluff in one location but the bottom of the bluff in another?  Concluding that these points (or the triangle as a whole) were significant because of an approximate conformity to a Standard Macro-Unit is circular reasoning, without a priori grounds for deciding exactly where to put the triangle to begin with. 

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