A group of nearly a dozen safari-clad people stood at top of the Indian Mounds on Wednesday searching to explain a previously discovered, unexplained phenomenon.The University’s two Indian Mounds provide recreation for children and drunken students and have lost samples of their dirt for scientific research.As the second part of a class project, researchers from throughout the University and the state spent the day coring, or pulling samples from, the 5,000-year-old mounds.This coring project aimed to date the mounds through carbon dating, demonstrate how far the mounds have sank into the ground, identify how they were built and   explain an inexplicable phenomenon discovered during the first portion of the project, according to Brooks Ellwood, geology and geophysics professor.”We wanted some additional data,” Ellwood said. “When we ran the last course, we identified a big anomaly … It suggests that it was probably a fired zone and a really hot fired zone.”The fired zone likely originated from an old fired hearth — but a hearth capable of being hotter than a typical hearth. The mounds haven’t been cored since the 1980s.”Nobody had a project that they wanted to do on the mounds that they felt they would be allowed to do,” Ellwood said of the nearly 30-year gap since the last coring. “If you’re going to do an archaeological project, you’ve got have a plan; you’ve got to have permissions. Whatever you dig, that’s gone forever. People are reluctant to have someone go in and excavate in the mounds.”The Louisiana Antiquities Commission granted permission for the project. The results of the study will have to be submitted to the Commmisssion. Funding for the project came from money from Ellwood’s endowed professorship.—-Contact Lindsey Meaux at [email protected]