The LSU Campus Mounds are two Native American earthworks on high ground above the Mississippi River floodplain in Baton Rouge. Built during the Archaic Period, they began more than 11,000 years ago and may have continued to about 5,000 years ago, making them among North America’s oldest surviving human-made structures and older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Scholars have generally viewed them as ceremonial landscape features rather than burial mounds, though later research raised the possibility of cremated remains and even greater age. Preserved amid a busy university campus, they have required repeated protection and restoration and were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.