Tailgaters will have to stay off the Indian Mounds on home football game days this season.
The Indian Mounds are more than 6,000 years old, and countless fans on game days who ride bikes and slide down the University landmarks on cardboard boxes add pressure to the structures. They’re already vulnerable to natural damage, including rainwater in the cracks of the mounds that advances their erosion.
Brooks Ellwood, a Robey H. Clark Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, said the mounds are precious to the campus and recognized by the National Register of Historic Places.
“We’re destroying them,” Ellwood said. “People say, ‘Well, [we] can’t cause that much damage,’ but if you look over there, we have a serious problem.”
Ellwood said prohibiting traffic on the mounds on game days will be worth the effort to shield them from further damage.
He said this is the most concerted effort that has been made to protect them.
“Everyone has been concerned about the increased damage we physically see, even from a distance,” Ellwood said. “In order to mitigate that … just at those times with extremely large numbers of people up there, everybody agreed we should cut the volume down — just on game days. As long as they don’t ride bikes and slide down on mats, it’s OK.”
Faculty and students will tailgate Saturday in the areas around the Indian Mounds for LSU’s home opener against Mississippi State to provide information about the reasons for staying off the mounds.
“Informed Ph.D. and master’s-level students and faculty will be there, along with interested and concerned folks who can answer questions, show where damage is and what this is doing to prevent it,” Ellwood said. “There will be a slideshow with a series of pictures showing the damage.”
An excavation is planned for a small area on the top of the northern mound next year, “a very careful, slow excavation” that will be open to the public, Ellwood said.
It will be the first time any such excavation has taken place on top of the mounds, though others have been done around their bases.
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Contact Rachel Whittaker at [email protected]