Mound Math

Strand: History, Culture, Archaeology, Mathematics
Grade Level: 9 - 12
Duration: 30 minutes
Location: On site, Effigy Mounds National Monument.  Mound Math requires permission from the Effigy Mounds staff prior to your visit.  Measuring a mound in Mound Math will require walking on a mound which is normally not allowed at the monument.
Objective: Using data from a conical mound students will be able to estimate how much human labor and materials went into building a conical mound.
Materials: 100 foot or 25 foot tape measure (depends on the size of the mound to be measured
pocket calculator if you want final computations to be done at monument
Vocabulary: conical mound
Procedure: This procedure assumes that a conical mound is an exact half of a sphere above the ground.  We know of course that this is not the case.  But by using the formula below students will be able to reasonably estimate the number of baskets of dirt it took to build a mound.
  1. Using the tape, measure the mound from point A to point B.  The example assumes a measurement of 22 feet.  Now plug that measurement into the formula included into the student directions.
  2. The estimate below assumes that a basket measured from point A to B would be 30 inches.   A human could reasonably carry a basket of that size full of dirt.
  3. Now divide the total number of cubic feet of dirt in the mound (724) by the cubic feet of dirt in one basket (1.06).  Your total will roughly be 683 baskets of dirt for the size of the mound cited in the example.
 

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Effigy Mounds National Monument