Nearly 1,000 years before Egypt’s Great Pyramid rose from the desert, people in what is now Louisiana began raising earthworks whose purpose remains a mystery.
The Daily Mail highlighted Watson Brake, near Monroe, where 11 mounds connected by earthen ridges form an enclosure roughly 1,000 feet across. Construction began around 3500 B.C. and continued for 600 to 700 years. Its hunter-gatherer builders helped overturn assumptions about who could organize monumental construction.
“It is unclear why Watson Brake and other Middle Archaic mounds were built,” archaeologist Rebecca Saunders wrote for 64 Parishes, a publication of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
That enduring question opens a wider story about America’s ancient earthworks, a subject author and researcher L.A. Marzulli explores in his documentary series, On the Trail of the Nephilim.
Marzulli approaches the subject through Scripture. He interprets Genesis 6 as describing the offspring of fallen angels and human women and connects those beings to the giants later encountered in the Promised Land.
His research proposes that some Nephilim tribes escaped Canaan during its conquest and migrated elsewhere. In an excerpt from On the Trail of the Nephilim II published on his website, he wrote that “many of the giants, the Nephilim tribes, fled the area and migrated to other parts of the world.”
That proposed migration underlies his search for traces of the biblical giants in the Americas.
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Marzulli says he collected historical newspaper accounts describing unusually large skeletons unearthed in the United States, including reports of remains measuring 12 feet or more. He sees those accounts as leads worth investigating.
He also points to archival photographs of skeletons excavated on Catalina Island. Marzulli reports that four analysts estimated the photographed skeletons at approximately 9 feet tall, reinforcing his interest in a possible connection to the biblical giants.
Accounts he cites from Native American individuals provide another thread. In a January 2019 article on his website, Marzulli referenced Joseph Riverwind’s statements about tribes fighting giants and his belief that giants constructed the mounds.
Those accounts address the identity of the builders. The earthworks themselves raise another question for Marzulli: What knowledge and capabilities did those builders possess?
At Ohio’s Newark Earthworks, he points to precise geometry and astronomical alignments. Marzulli wrote that surveyor and engineer Todd Willis examined the Great Circle’s interior moat and found it essentially level. He considers that precision a reason to look deeper into the builders’ engineering knowledge.
In Louisiana, his team investigated the labor involved at Poverty Point, a separate complex built much later than Watson Brake. They used a replica flint hoe and timed a laborer digging and transporting dirt.
Marzulli reported that their calculations indicated the enormous mound would require approximately 26 million individual bucketloads of earth.
“Something is wrong with this picture!” he wrote in December 2018.
Taken together, these threads shape his interpretation: Accounts of giants suggest a possible identity, while the structures’ scale and precision suggest capabilities he connects with a supernatural origin.
Marzulli describes certain Ohio sites as possible examples of “Nephilim architecture or fallen angel technology.”
For him, the biblical significance reaches into the conflict between fallen angels and God’s purposes. He understands the earthworks as potential traces of that rebellion, describing the mounds as “the fingerprints of the supernatural.”
Watson Brake’s unanswered purpose draws attention to America’s deep past. Across his investigations of other earthworks, Marzulli pursues the possibility that ancient structures and historical accounts preserve clues to the beings described in Scripture.
“This history points to the fact that the Biblical narrative of the Nephilim was a reality,” he wrote.
James Lasher, a seasoned writer and editor at Charisma Media, combines faith and storytelling with a journalism background from Otterbein University and ministry experience in Guatemala and at the LA Dream Center. A Marine Corps and Air Force veteran, he is the author of The Revelation of Jesus: A Common Man’s Commentary and a contributor to Charisma magazine. For interviews and media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
