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In western Washington State, just south of Puget Sound, a series of dirt mounds are scattered along the Mima Prairie. These seemingly arbitrary extrusions of earth are the subject of great debate, as their origins are not quite clear. A number of hypotheses have been formed in the hundred years since the mounds were first studied, though none have been proven to date.
The Mima Prairie lies in the Puget Sound basin west of the Cascade Range. The area was covered by the Puget lobe of the Cordillera Ice Sheet during the Vashon Stade of the Fraser Glaciation, approximately 15,000 to 13,000 yr BP. The surficial terrain consists of sandy outwash sediments [Thorson 1980]. The mounds themselves are six to eight feet high and about thirty feet across [Nelson 1994], and though similar masses appear elsewhere—Wyoming, Arkansas, Mexico, Argentina, Kenya—the mounds on the Mima Prairie are the largest known to exist [Geiger 1998].
One of the first answers to the question of the mounds’......

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