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Poverty Point Culture: A Definition

Poverty Point culture is an archaeological picture of how certain
Lower Mississippi Valley peoples lived between around 1730 and 1350
B.C. Archaeologists have identified aspects of this way of life over
a large area of the Lower Mississippi Valley from a northerly point
near the present junction of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers
(above the present-day town of Greenville, Mississippi) to the Gulf
coast. This area includes parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Arkansas. In addition, tools and ornaments resembling Poverty Point
types have been found as far up the river as Tennessee and Missouri
and along the Gulf coast as far east as Tampa, Florida, and the
Atlantic coast of Georgia.

Archaeologists identify Poverty Point culture by its characteristic
artifacts and the nonlocal rocks used to make them. Imported rocks
and minerals include various cherts and flints, soapstone, hematite,
magnetite, slate, galena, copper, and many others. Radiocarbon dates
indicate that some raw materials were being traded to the Poverty
Point site and other sections of the Poverty Point culture area by
1730 B.C. The arrival of substantial amounts of these trade
materials is a convenient point to define the onset of Poverty Point
culture, and their disappearance, a good point to mark its end.

Some characteristic Poverty Point-style artifacts were being made
more than 5,000 years ago, but most came into existence over the
next 1,500 years. They include hand-molded baked clay cooking
objects, simple thick-walled pottery, and stone vessels. Other
representative artifacts are chipped stone tools, like spear points,
adzes, hoes, drills, perforators, edge-retouched flakes, and blades.
Polished stone tools, like celts, plummets, and gorgets, as well as
polished stone ornaments, like beads, pendants, and animal figures,
are also characteristic. Typical artifacts and trade materials
existed for about three or four centuries or until around 1350 B.C.

Poverty Point Artifacts

*Artifacts Characteristic of Poverty Point Culture

*Much of what we know about Poverty Point artifacts and trade
materials is based on the Poverty Point site. This is partly because
Poverty Point is larger and has been more extensively investigated
than other sites, but it is also because the site was so important
in overall trade relations in the Lower Mississippi Valley. When the
Poverty Point site flourished, trade flourished; when the Poverty
Point site was abandoned, trade ceased, and so did the flow of
information that accompanied trade. If the Poverty Point site had
not existed, there would be little reason to set off Poverty Point
culture from the general culture that existed at the time.

Because Poverty Point culture is defined in terms of stone tools and
trade rocks, it really represents a technological and economic
pattern more than a social and political one. The technology and
economy were not confined to one large body of kinfolks or to a
single tribe, nation, or ethnic group. They were not confined to
people who spoke the same language. Many groups of people bore
Poverty Point culture, and most of them were unrelated and
politically independent.

Even though Poverty Point culture does not correspond to a single
social or political group, it was made up of them, many of them. One
of these groups was Poverty Point society itself, the people living
within 20 to 25 miles of the Poverty Point site, a community that
interacted on a regular face-to-face basis. Archaeologists depend on
unique tools and other details to recognize villages and camps
belonging to the Poverty Point community. Although tools throughout
the Poverty Point community were made in the same styles and of the
same variety of rocks, not all sites had the same set of tools or
materials. The closer sites were to the Poverty Point site, the more
likely tools were to be made out of nonlocal trade rocks. On the
fringes of the Poverty Point community, local gravels were often
substituted for nonlocal materials, but trade materials that did
manage to reach out into the peripheries were usually made into the
same kinds of tools as at the Poverty Point site.

Beyond the 25-mile radius around the site, Poverty Point artifact
styles and trade rocks were less common, except in a few places,
some of them hundreds of miles away. Outside of the 25-mile core
area, artifact styles differ a little or they differ a lot, and,
with a few exceptions, distance from the Poverty Point site has a
lot to do with how strong the differences are.

Poverty Point culture and Poverty Point society are not the same
thing. Poverty Point culture is an archaeological concept used to
describe a wide area of general artifact similarities within the
Lower Mississippi Valley. Poverty Point society was the
once-thriving community, which conducted its daily activities in and
around the Poverty Point site for three or four centuries before
quitting the trade business that set it apart from earlier and later
societies. 

Settlement

A map showing the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1500 B.C., during the
zenith of Poverty Point culture, reveals some very interesting
things. Population was clustered in certain areas, and these areas
were separated from each other, sometimes by scores of miles. While
the pattern of geographic separation is due in part to river erosion
and spotty archaeological investigation, it also reflects cultural
preferences for certain kinds of land. Although various locations
were chosen for individual villages or camps, each cluster included
high land and swampland, often separated by low bluffs.

The largest cluster was in the Yazoo Basin of western Mississippi.
Another large cluster surrounded the Poverty Point site in the Upper
Tensas Basin-Maçon Ridge region of northeastern Louisiana. Still
others were located on the Ouachita River in southern Arkansas, in
the Vermilion Basin-Coteau Ridge region of south central Louisiana
and in the Lower Pearl River-Hancock Terrace region of coastal
Mississippi.

Map of Surrounding Sites

*How the Lower Mississippi Valley might have looked in 1500 B.C.,
showing courses of major rivers and locations of Poverty Point
territories.* /Drawing by Jon Gibson

/Lying between these clusters were areas of uninhabited or lightly
occupied land. In possibly one or two places, there were pockets of
concentrated population, which, for various reasons, did not
participate regularly or intensively in Poverty Point trade.

The map shows another interesting feature. The scattered population
clusters were all linked by the Mississippi River. Although the
river itself did not run through every cluster, streams connecting
with the Mississippi did. Some of these streams actually occupied
old channels of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. These
interconnected streams were highways that carried people, trade
goods, and ideas to the various corners of the Poverty Point
cultural network. We have very little evidence suggesting that
overland trails were as important as they had been earlier when
people lived out in the hills and made only seasonal use of river
valleys.

Most Poverty Point peoples lived in small permanent villages and
seasonal camps along streams and cutoff lakes in old abandoned river
channels. These living areas ranged in size from less than an acre
to more than 100 acres. Small settlements housed only a few
families, while larger ones had dozens. Some archaeologists believe
several thousand people lived at the Poverty Point site, but others
think it was a campground occupied temporarily during ceremonies and
trade fairs. Poverty Point people also had small, temporary
campsites, where hunting and gathering parties spent the night while
away from home.

Village sites differed from one another in more ways than size. One,
and sometimes more, large sites in each Poverty Point cluster had
artificial mounds and sometimes C-shaped embankments. There was
usually only one mound, but as many as eight mounds were built in
some cases. They were made of dirt and were usually dome-shaped, but
two large mounds at the Poverty Point site were shaped like flying
birds. Generally, the larger the site, the larger the mounds. Large
sites also tended to have more mounds than small ones.

Excavations have not determined how the mounds were used. Domed
mounds look like those used as tombs by later cultures, but, with
one exception, no burials have been found in them. James Ford and
Stuart Neitzel did find a burned fragment of a human thighbone in a
bed of ashes beneath the large domed mound at the Poverty Point
site, but no bones were found in the mound itself. Postmolds from a
circular house were buried underneath a low domed mound at the
Jaketown site in the Yazoo Basin, but whether the house had anything
to do with the mound being built at the spot is unknown.

*Artists reconstruction of the central ridged enclosure at the
Poverty Point site as it may have appeared in 1350 B.C. */Drawing by
Jon Gibson

/When archaeologists excavated part of the tail of the largest bird
mound at Poverty Point, they found nothing that indicated the
purpose of the mound. However, a mound shaped liked a bird was
probably a memorial or shrine, rather than a tomb or temple base.
Earth embankments were occasionally built at the bigger settlements.
Sometimes, they had domestic trash, postmolds, and fire pits in or
on them and seem to have served as foundations for houses or
portable shelters. C-shaped layouts were the most common patterns,
as illustrated by the six concentric ridges at Poverty Point.
Another pattern was two half rings, like those at the Claiborne and
Cedarland sites on the Mississippi Gulf coast, which resembled a
figure eight cut in half, lengthwise. Besides house foundations,
embankments have been claimed to be astronomical figures and
military breastworks.

The Maçon Ridge-Upper Tensas Basin stands out from the rest of the
localities. Not only is the Poverty Point site located here, but
dozens of sites are located within a 25-mile radius of Poverty
Point. These sites have larger proportions of typical Poverty Point
artifacts than sites in other clusters, and they usually have more
trade materials, too. These conditions resulted from being under
Poverty Point's direct influence.

The importance of the Poverty Point site to its own community, as
well as to distant communities scattered throughout the Lower
Mississippi Valley, requires that we take a closer look at this
significant place. It was first reported by archaeologist Samuel
Lockett in 1873, and it was visited by many archaeologists
afterwards. It was excavation conducted by James Ford and Stuart
Neitzel of the American Museum of Natural History in the early 1950s
that really disclosed its unusual nature. Routine inspection of an
aerial photograph led Ford to a startling discovery: Poverty Point
was an earthen enclosure, built on such a large scale that it defied
recognition from ground level.

The geometric layout suggested that the earthworks had been built
according to a master plan in a massive all-out building program.
Their size, coupled with millions of artifacts scattered on and in
them, gave an impression that Poverty Point was home for a large
population and a magnet for visitors. Although new information has
caused us to rethink some of these ideas, we are still awed by the
massiveness of the engineering feat and appreciative of the
collective spirit of those ancient people whose vision and toil are
represented there.

A C-shaped figure dominates the center of the site. The figure is
formed by six concentric artificial earth embankments, which now
stand 4 to 6 feet (1 to 2 m) high and 140 to 200 feet (43 to 60 m)
apart. They are separated by ditches, or swales, where dirt was
removed to build the ridges. The ends of the outermost ridge are
3,950 feet (1.2 km) apart, nearly three-quarters of a mile, while
the ends of the interior embankment are 1,950 feet (594 m) apart.
The embankments end along a 25-foot-high bluff, which marks the wall
of the Mississippi River floodplain. A small sluggish stream, Bayou
Maçon, hugs the foot of the bluff beneath the earthworks.

Archaeologists first believed the six ridges formed a complete
octagonal enclosure and that the Arkansas River ate away the eastern
section. Recent information shows this was never the case. The bluff
was cut thousands of years before the Indians built the rings. In
fact, it posed a building and maintenance problem from the outset,
and efforts to repair and stabilize it can be seen in the layers of
red and yellow dirt used to fill old gullies underneath the northern
ridges.

The ridges are divided into six sectors by five crosscutting aisles,
or corridors. These aisles are from 35 to 160 feet (10 to 49 m)
wide. They do not converge at a single point inside the enclosure
nor do they divide embankments into equal-size sectors. The long
straight aisles have been identified as astronomical sighting lines
and as boundary lines between social and functional zones. Another
idea is that the aisles were formed when the ridge builders used
geometry and simple equipment to lay out arc segments to form the
half-oval shape.

In addition to the aisles, the southwestern section of the enclosure
is bisected by an extra ridge, which parallels the southwestern
aisle. The bisector ridge starts at the innermost ridge encircling
the plaza, runs across the outer concentric ridges, and then extends
an additional 300 feet (91 m) beyond the enclosure. The extension,
or Causeway as it is called, crosses a large depression, which may
be a natural depression or a borrow pit for ridge soil. It ends near
Ballcourt Mound.

In the center of the ridged enclosure is the plaza, a flat, open
area covering about 37 acres. Along its eastern edge is a platform
mound (called Bluff, or Dunbar, Mound), which appears to have had
two levels: a low flat-top base topped by a smaller dome-shaped
addition. The mound was built in stages, and wooden buildings were
erected on some stage summits. The southeasternmost edge of the
plaza was built up with dirt, and nearby, another low platform mound
(Sarah's Mount) was built on the southern end of the inner
embankment of the main enclosure.

On the western side of the plaza at the Poverty Point site,
archaeologist William Haag excavated some unusually large and deep
pits. If these held posts, they had to be the size of grown trees!
Too big to have been used for ordinary residences or even ceremonial
buildings, these huge posts are imagined to be calendar markers for
important days like equinoxes and solstices, an American Stonehenge
made of wood.

Outside the ridged enclosure are other mounds and embankments. The
largest and most unusual is Mound A, located just beyond the outer
ridge in the western part of the enclosure. This mound, thought to
represent a flying bird, stands more than 70 feet (21 m) high and
measures 640 feet (195 m) along the wing and 710 feet (216 m) from
head to tail. The flattened, or tail, section of the huge structure
was built in a depression some 12 or more feet (3.7 m) deep. A
similar but slightly smaller mound, the Motley Mound, lies 1.5 miles
(2.4 km) north of the central enclosure. Because it had only a
slight bulge where the bird's tail should have been, it is believed
to be unfinished.

Three more mounds are positioned along a north-south line that
passes through the main bird mound. About 0.4 miles (.6 km) north of
the big mound is a domed mound, Mound B, which is about 180 feet (55
m) in diameter and 20 feet (6 m) high. Some 600 feet (183 m) south
of the bird mound is Ballcourt Mound, a flat-topped structure about
100 feet (30 m) square. Although it is called Ballcourt Mound, there
is no indication that it ever really served as a ballcourt. For
years, it was thought to be a natural knoll that had been sculpted
into shape, but recent investigations have shown it to be
artificial, just like the other mounds.

About 1.6 miles (2.6 km) south of Ballcourt Mound and along the same
axis is a second domed mound, Lower Jackson Mound. At one time, this
mound was thought to be the southernmost Poverty Point mound. Now,
we think it is much older than the other mounds, perhaps dating a
thousand years or more earlier. The fact that it lines up so
precisely with three mounds at the earthwork center may be
coincidental, but it probably is intentional and meant to tie the
old mound and whatever it stood for into the grand Poverty Point plan.

Poverty Point Earthworks

*The Poverty Point Earthworks. */Drawing by Jon Gibson

/Other nearby earthworks: a C-shaped embankment with mounds
incorporated in the middle and each end and at least one other mound
on the Jackson Place immediately south of the ridged enclosure, may
have been part of the overall Poverty Point layout. That is
difficult to prove because they have been flattened by modern
cultivation.

The majority of Poverty Point's inhabitants lived on the
embank-ments in the central enclosure, but some people lived and
worked outside the enclosure. Important living and working areas
were scattered along the bluff between the ridges and Motley Mound
and between the ridges intermittently to Lower Jackson Mound, more
than a mile and a half (2.4 km) to the south. In addition, people
lived west of Motley Mound and a quarter mile (.4 km) southwest and
from a quarter mile to two miles (.4 to 3.2 km) west of Mound A.

Very little is known about Poverty Point houses and furnishings. The
outline of a house was found at the Jaketown site in Mississippi.
The Jaketown house pattern was small and circular, around 13 to 15
feet (4 to 4.6 m) in diameter.

No definite house patterns have been reported at the Poverty Point
site. Does the lack of evidence for substantial houses mean that
Poverty Point was a temporary encampment and that flimsy or portable
shelters were used? No, it does not. It is likely that modern
plowing destroyed the remains of permanent houses that might have
stood on top of the ridges. 

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