Preserving Culture and Coastlines: LSU Alumna Applies Cutting-Edge Techniques on Mounds, Louisiana Delta

As a student, Liz Chamberlain often walked past the LSU Campus Mounds, briefly soaking in their charm and mystery before rushing off to class.

 

 

“They were beautiful, but also sort of in the background of my college experience,” she said.

In November, she returned to campus as Liz Chamberlain, Ph.D., part of a research team studying the mounds and utilizing Chamberlain’s expertise in a scientific method that dates ancient materials like geological sediment by measuring when sand grains were last exposed to sunlight.

This is the first time the technique — optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL — has been employed on the LSU Campus mounds. Chamberlain hopes she and her fellow researchers can shed light on some of the mounds’ mysteries, primarily their age.

“I feel like it's a very important story for LSU, for Louisiana, and for understanding the cultural heritage of the campus and of this landscape,” she said, adding that her expertise in OSL is “a nice way that I can contribute."

Chamberlain, an assistant professor at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, made the long trip back to Louisiana to conduct the work. It’s a trip she’s made several times since earning her master's in geology from the Geology and Geophysics department in 2012.

On past trips, her focus has been Louisiana’s disappearing coastline, another important issue she learned about during her time in the state. She’s also using OSL to help understand and ultimately help mitigate the problem.

 “Through my time in Louisiana, I got to see this change in the landscape and the coast and see how important the environmental processes are to the way that we live here,” she said.

The Campus Mounds

The Campus Mounds researchers hope to determine when construction on the mounds likely began by OSL dating a sample of sediment taken from the original land surface, below the mounds, to pinpoint the moment in time when it was first elevated by ancient people.

 

Chamberlain said that while radiocarbon dating has been conducted on the mounds in the past, a new approach using OSL can make determinations that radiocarbon may miss.

“You can imagine, in a mound-building process, we have this natural land surface, and people are moving around on it, and they start to pile up the sediment that constructs the mounds,” she said. “And within that sediment, there might be organics, like plant material, that can be used for radiocarbon dating.

“Those organics can be very old because they can come not from the mound building process itself and from that cultural activity, but instead from the old landscape that was mined for the sediment to build the mound.

“And so, with optically stimulated luminescence, because it directly measures sand grains and their sunlight exposure, we can date cultural activity.”

Samples collected in November will be analyzed at the Netherlands Centre for Luminescence dating, where Chamberlain is a researcher, with results expected around late 2025.

In addition to Chamberlain, partners in this effort represent LSU’s Geography & Anthropology Department , the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, the National Park Service's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, and the University of Kansas’ Department of Anthropology. 

Also integral to the project, according to team member Tad Britt of the National Park Service, is the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana. The tribe’s involvement is essential to the LSU Campus Mounds within broader North American archaeological studies, Britt says, and should illuminate the dynamic interactions between the Chitimacha Tribe and their environment. 

The tribe's participation allows for the development of a comprehensive narrative tracing the region’s history from the past to present day and can significantly contribute to a better understanding of Native American culture in Louisiana, Earth science, and world history.

The Louisiana Coast

Chamberlain said a Delta Geology course at LSU, taught by professor Sam Bentley, the Billy and Ann Harrison Chair in Sedimentary Geology, helped her understand that the way South Louisiana formed over thousands of years manifests in the coastal issues seen today.

“For me, that course was where it all clicked,” she said, leading her to participate in a series of projects to help save Louisiana’s coastline.

In recent years, Chamberlain has worked with a team from LSU on a RESTORE Act Center of Excellence for Louisiana (LA-COE) project. The project focuses on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion — a major initiative to divert sediment and water into Barataria Bay to rebuild land.

The team’s role was to examine the sediment layers beneath the bay — looking at how old the ground is where the diversion will happen. By doing this, they hope to understand how much the land there has sunk in the past, predict how much it might sink in the future, and consider how engineering practices might maintain it.

 

“In these coastal areas, it's really important to have land and wetlands — marshes — because this is what protects the more inland areas like New Orleans from storm surges,” she said. The project also investigates the role of deltas in the global carbon cycle, a topic Chamberlain will explore further in the international Leaky Deltas workshop she is co-organizing  on LSU’s campus this March.

Prior to that, Chamberlain said, a study in Lafourche and Terrebonne parish coastal areas used OSL dating to help determine how quickly the shoreline was built over time. Researchers were able to reconstruct how Bayou Lafourche — back when it was a major river channel — helped create land in the Mississippi Delta.

“We found that Bayou Lafourche and the other channels connected to it built land at rates of six square kilometers per year, which is really great if you think about that in the context of offsetting land loss and what we're seeing today in the Delta,” she said.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside. Over the past century, land has been disappearing much faster than the rate at which it was built over recent millennia. 

“So, it was kind of a sad story about land loss in that regard, but still showing land building processes are very possible here.”

‘I Just Really Loved Louisiana’

Though she’s from Wisconsin, Chamberlain lived much of her adult life in Louisiana, during and after her time at LSU. Her recent return to campus was a treat, she said.  

“It's really nice to be back in Louisiana. I always love it when I get to come back here,” she said. “To me, it feels like home and just nice to walk around LSU's campus, to see my colleagues, drop in and visit professors that I learned from.”

She said her fondness for Louisiana can be traced to a childhood family vacation.

“We went to Grand Isle, and I just really loved Louisiana,” she said. “I loved the culture, the warmth, the environment, everything. And coincidentally, LSU football was very strong when I was in high school, and so there was a lot of good advertising in that regard that kept it on my radar.”

She enrolled at LSU in 2002 and started on a pre-veterinarian track before learning she didn’t like working with animals. Next came a shift to the arts, which she enjoyed. But when it came to choosing a career path, geoscience won out.

At LSU, she observed that Louisiana residents are acutely connected to their environment and aware of coastal issues.

“For me, it's a great place to work where the science that we do, in my case as an academic, connects to immediate issues that are important to people.”

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