The Shala Daily

When archaeologists sift through the ancient shell mounds at Ellis Landing, they don’t find the grand, planned monuments of rulers, but something perhaps even more profound: the quiet persistence of a place shaped by centuries of communal practice. In a recent paper on ResearchGate, researchers argue that these mounds, though amorphous and unplanned, gained their monumental significance through layers of ritual and memory, not through blueprints or the decree of an elite.

This challenges our assumptions about what makes something monumental—and invites us to reconsider how everyday acts, returned to again and again, shape the world around us.

🌀 Community as Monument

Unlike the stepped pyramids of other ancient societies, the shell mounds at Ellis Landing reveal no evidence of careful architectural planning. Instead, their form is amorphous, evolving as generations gathered, feasted, buried their dead, and remembered. Over time, these repeated acts transformed an ordinary patch of earth into a persistent place—a living memory bank encoded in layers of shell and soil.

In yoga, the concept of samskara refers to the grooves carved in consciousness by repeated actions. The mounds, too, are physical samskaras—residues of ritual, grief, and gathering, built not by design, but by devotion and return.

🌱 Ritual, Impermanence, and Belonging

The shell mounds teach us about ritual’s quiet power. Even without permanence or planning, the act of coming together—cooking, honoring ancestors, sharing stories—becomes monumental. Like the mounds, our practices on the mat are less about perfection and more about persistence, about showing up to be reshaped by the ordinary sacraments of breath and movement.

Impermanence is written in the shifting shapes of these mounds, just as it’s woven into our own lives. What appears amorphous or unremarkable may, over time, become the ground of belonging and meaning.

🕸️ The Web of Memory

The research reminds us that monumentality isn’t always about power or permanence; sometimes it’s simply the echo of lives lived in community, ritual, and care. The mounds persist not because they were designed to last, but because people kept returning, layering intention upon intention.

What might we build, individually and together, if we tend as lovingly to our rituals, our communities, and our memories as those ancient mound-builders did?

— MJH