Poverty Point: Archaic Anomaly?

[Music] poverty point is an amazing site thousands of years ago it became the first city in north america and for a long time the only city of its scale north of mesoamerica you can easily recognize it by its large mounds and rings that still daunt visitors after centuries of wear and tear its grandeur only matched by its antiquity now ancient mountains aren't that unique in the southern and eastern united states mountainside stopped the u.s map but in that respect poverty point looks like a grand example of mound construction from ancient native americans and yet poverty point is a mystery and so much more much of the site defies our expectations and although we've come a long way in understanding it so much continues to elude us is this site an anomaly and how does it fit into the bigger picture okay hopefully i've wet your appetite so let's dig into this but before we get into the meat and potatoes let's get some veggies in first by examining the first conclusions drawn about poverty point poverty point had been known since the 1800s our first descriptions of the site come from the diary of settler jacob walter who passed through in the 1830s he was looking for a reported lead mine that was rumored to be nearby when he stumbled upon poverty point after his visit he recorded this in his diary on my arrival at the place of my destination on bayou massan at which place i had been informed led or had been found instead of a lead mine i found myself on the site of an old indian town the surface of the earth at this place for several acres around were strewed in great profusion with fragments of indian crockery and a large number of clay made by the indians for edible purposes indicating the fact that the inhabitants who located the town were a tribe of clay-eating indians the clay balls were the size of a green walnut and had been baked in fire thus disappointed in the discovery of a lead mine i mounted my horse i rode out to look and see what the country looked like in the vicinity of this old town site i soon discovered a mound of colossal size the figure of the base of this substructure was a rectangle twice as long as white and about a thousand long by 500 broad and 150 feet in altitude with top or terrace of 20 feet wide and 500 feet long this mount has an inclined plane attached to one side with a grade so as to enable one to ride up on it with ease i did pass up this inclined way on my horse this is one of the largest mounds i have ever met with aside from a few other visitors notes poverty point was mostly ignored during the antebellum period the site would become part of the poverty point plantation which is where we actually get the name of the site from it's not what the inhabitants would have called it now serious archaeological work was not actually conducted until the early 20th century to these early archaeologists it was clear the poverty point was already something of an oddity the tools being dug up there were archaic tools the archaic period refers to the time period before sedentary life in agriculture in north america so this was old yet lots of residential artifacts and cooking pits were discovered as well so lots of people were clearly living there if these artifacts predated sedentary life what the heck were those mounds doing there and who built them in 1956 archaeologists james ford and clarence webb published their seminal work poverty point a late archaic site in louisiana in which they argued that poverty point was a city populated by thousands of people farming maize and living in a theocracy all had been well until hopewell war parties arrived from the north conquered poverty point and then coerced the locals into building the mounds you'll notice that ford and webb like most of their contemporaries were pretty married to the idea that the mounds and agriculture went hand in hand and this would persist through the next few decades after further research discredited the hopewell conquest theories ford and webb suggested that perhaps olmec missionaries came north through the gulf bringing colossal construction and corn farming with them but people slowly began to realize that the people of poverty point were not utilizing agriculture and that like their contemporaries they had been hunter-gatherers by the late 20th century it had become fashionable to suggest that poverty point had only been a gathering place for independent groups to exchange goods and participate in religious festivals rather than a continually inhabited city but the thousands of artifacts recovered from poverty point many of them designed for domestic use suggest otherwise only gradually could people put everything together and break with their biases and conclude that poverty point was unlike anything seen before it was a residential city of hunter-gatherers a paradox or as i would call it a glitch in the matrix but in fact poverty point is not a glitch rather than an anomaly it's fitting to view it as the apogee of archaic america with that in mind let's pull the camera back and look at the wider picture of what was going on during the archaic and see what was being missed by those early archaeologists that we can now appreciate in hindsight during the archaic period life in north america was characterized by mobile hunter-gatherer groups during this period no intensive agriculture or crop domestication was being practiced but interestingly one thing that was happening was mound construction contrary to what archaeologists had previously concluded the mounds of poverty point were not the first in the lower mississippi basin by the time they were built mound building had already been a long and hallowed tradition in the region the oldest known mounds date for more than 7 thousand years ago but it's not until about after 4000 bce that mound building really begins to take off the most noteworthy mound sites from this period are frenchmen's bend caney watson break and the lsu campus mounds yes you heard that last one correct louisiana state university has some of the oldest mountains in north america sitting right on their campus go tigers what makes several of these sites fascinating is that we can see similarities in their design and layout even common proportions and measurements have been demonstrated between them watson break gives us a good example the site is located on an abandoned channel of the arkansas wichita river the mounds at the site are arranged in a circular pattern and date to about 3 400 to 3000 bce a full 2 000 years before most of poverty points construction unfortunately i couldn't find any photos of the site and it's not open to the public so you guys are stuck with this reconstruction instead now you may be wondering how could hunter gatherers actually build these earthworks wouldn't you need to be living at the same place in a large community for generations to do it well contrary to what you may think and i hope i'm not spoiling the mystique of mound building building a mound doesn't actually require as much labor as you think it does provided that you have the time archaeologist john gibson points out that a small local workforce can erect a decently sized mound he cites an account from a missionary's interview of a chuck todd native who reported that a local 12 000 cubic meter mound had recently been built in just 35 months dirt moving tests have concluded that it only would have taken dozens of laborers depending on breaks in the construction time i will point out the caveat that the study comes from a sedentary and agricultural group millennial later but nevertheless i think it's safe to say that it doesn't take a gigantic labor force to build mounds and that could easily be accomplished by archaic native americans archaic people as it turns out were far more constructive than we give them credit now with all that out of the way let's zoom back into poverty point itself and examine the site poverty point is located on a ridge overlooking the bayou mission which prevents the area from getting flooded the surrounding bayou is a naturally rich environment full of edible plants roots nuts fish and other animals thus everyone had a high and dry place for shelter but easy access to the bayou and food all in all it was an excellent place to settle down it had everything a community would need now chronology at poverty point is not a hundred percent certain but the general consensus is that the entire site was constructed and occupied from about 1730 bce to about a thousand bce most of the construction would have occurred between 1600 bce and 1300 bce what suddenly triggered this massive building program remains a mystery so what exactly did they build the site is characterized by a series of six earthen rings that enclose a raised plaza outside the rings are several mounds let's start at the center and work our way out the plaza is a large artificial platform to create it the people of poverty point had to fill in several channels and then level out the surface this is a large area and doing this must have been a huge undertaking you could fit the entire churchill downs race track in there the plaza was likely the site of ceremonies rituals and games during excavation several large post holes were discovered at the site these held huge wooden posts arranged in a circle if you go to the site you'll see them marked out by barrels archaeologists are unsure what this was used for it could have been a structure or it could have been a woodhenge like those that appear at much later sites such as the mississippian capital of cahokia later woodhenges had astronomical functions but that doesn't seem to have been the case here the plaza also has two mounds mount c and d mount c also called the dunbar mound in a lot of the literature was about six feet high and had about eight thousand cubic yards of earth excavations of the mound have revealed post holes which indicate that there was a structure on top but what this building was or what it was used for is unknown the fact that it's within the plaza suggests that it was very important mound d sits right at the edge of one of the rings it's about four feet tall it's also called sarah's mound because the wife of the plantation owner sarah guyer and two others were buried there during the site's plantation days speaking of which an important thing to remember is that the mounds were not used for burials this will be the case with later mounds in the americas but at this time they did not serve a mortuary function the location of mount d has sparked considerable debate about whether this is actually a mound or rather a very well preserved section of the ring excavations of the mound have revealed that most of the mound was constructed by later inhabitants over two thousand years after poverty point was abandoned however excavations at the bottom layers of the mound recovered many poverty point artifacts and even an old fire pit so it's likely that at one point mount c was indeed a part of the innermost ring beyond the plaza are six parallel ridges that ring the plaza the rings have been reduced over the centuries by erosion and farming there's actually very little of them left but in the days of old they would have risen as high as 10 feet the rings are cut by five roadways that emanate out from the plaza excavations revealed some post holes and a few housing remains and some cooking pits sadly plowing erosion and burrowing have destroyed a lot of the domestic evidence but the consensus is that the rings were topped by houses in all the rings could have held over 600 houses which would have been home to hundreds perhaps even thousands of people different rings went up as the population grew during poverty points history excavations show that when they were erected they were done rapidly there are no signs of prolonged exposure in any of the soil layers when a new ring was demanded it went up quickly in a calculated and coordinated fashion now let's check out the mounts beyond the rings in total there are five mounds the largest of the mounds is mound a it's connected to the plaza by a roadway mound a is enormous and needed over 230 000 cubic yards of earth to construct it if you were going to build that today you would need 17 000 dump trucks worth of earth to do it the mound is actually a conical pyramid with a ramp leading to a long platform extending on the eastern side the top of the mound is over six stories high it's often said that the mound was built to resemble a bird in flight but this interpretation originally goes back to the old hopewell invasion theory so its merits are debatable but it's often referred to as the bird mound or the eagle mound in literature now a mountain this big is something you would expect to have been built over a long period of time maybe even generations but the truth is actually much more weird excavations in the platform section show that that section was built very rapidly some even suggest that this was done in as little as 90 days the people of poverty point didn't mess around when they put forth their effort the next mound is mound b just to the north of mound a mound b is possibly the earliest of the mounds at the site it's a small conical mound about 21 feet tall and 180 feet in diameter mound e is another early mound at the site it's a rectangular mound 13 feet tall and 300 feet wide there's a causeway that runs from the mound to the plaza but whether this feature was constructed or came about naturally is debated the function of both mounds is uncertain but what is certain is that they were carefully planned mounds a b and e are built along a perfect north-south axis which shows that the people of poverty point were expert surveyors and astronomers actually those three mountains aren't even the only mounds in that axis to the south over a mile away from mound e is another mound the lower jackson mound this bound is really fascinating because it was built 1500 years before any of the other constructions at poverty point it's actually contemporary with those earlier archaic mounds we discussed earlier there's a lot of speculation that this may have been the anchor point of the site and that poverty point builders were honoring the memory of times and people long past when they built the site the last two mounds of poverty point are motley's mound to the north and mound f mound f is the smallest of all the mounds and it was only recently discovered motley mound is another large mound to the north of the site it's over five stories high and contains over 130 thousand cubic yards of earth its oval shape and dimensions have led some to speculate that its design was meant to mirror the design of mount a and was never finished what we can say with much more confidence about motley mound is that it has its own alignment the mound is perpendicular to the axis created by mounds a b and e and it also creates another north-south axis with mound c that runs almost perfectly parallel the striking layout at poverty point invites a lot of interpretation and speculation i've read the poverty points earthworks were arranged to recreate the cosmos and that they were a map of the greater area and that they were designed in that way to ward off evil we aren't going to get into all the merits of these this is already a long video and this is going real deep into the weeds if you're interested in reading up on those check my bibliography in the video description and you can sate your curiosity what's important is that the design and scale are unlike anything else in north america that we've discovered at its height poverty point would have been home to thousands of people embracing a new way of life so what was life at poverty point like how did such a large population sustain itself unfortunately organic matter does not preserve well in wetlands so we don't have as complete a picture of what was on the menu at poverty point as we'd like but it is possible to look at other nearby sites and piece together a picture of what the diet was as i mentioned earlier the magnitude of the earthworks at the site suggested that maize had been the engine of this flourishing city as it had been for many other american civilizations but when no maze remains were found that forced a tough reconsideration among the plants that have been identified are persimmons gourds little barley goosefoot maygrass and sunflower roasted nuts and mast show that food was not just being collected in the summer which is an important indication that habitation was year-round and not seasonal at least for some of the inhabitants what's also very telling about these plant remains is that none of them are domestic varieties which means that only wild food was being eaten at the site that's pretty mind-blowing when you think about it a huge community thrived for centuries on nothing but what nature provided them but the people of poverty point weren't just vegetarians they ate just about anything that moved swam or flew including deer turkeys waterfowl turtles and small game like rabbits raccoons and squirrels but the big food item was fish the lower mississippi wetlands are a cornucopia of aquatic food and fish were a very valuable and easily tapped resource in fact almost no other place in north america has as much fish density as these floodplains and swamps so high was this density that the 500 square miles around poverty point held anywhere from 30 000 to over a million pounds of fish not only are fish delicious and healthy fishing is an activity that can be done year round it's not a seasonal food source one of the ways that we know fish were widely exploited is that there's a lot of fishing plummets that have been found at the site these skillfully carved stones were made from stone rich in iron ore and were used to anchor nets to rivers and lake bottoms they were the perfect tools for the perfect place such nets and traps could have been easily used in a variety of conditions and kept fish fresh in the ovens wait why did i just say ovens and not table well because another set of important artifacts to come out of poverty point actually the most abundant artifacts are small earthen cooking balls made out of local lows these are called poverty point objects these are unique to poverty point and the surrounding area and likely the same clay items reported by jacob walter in our intro they come in many different shapes and sizes and are decorated with grooves and impressions now you might be wondering what a cooking ball is and how it's used the people of poverty point cooked their food in earth ovens dug into the ground several of which have been excavated at the site by filling these pits with balls they could retain the fire's heat and continue to slow cook the food like a crock pot not a bad way to eat at all food was prepared using pottery and stone bowls pottery isn't very abundant at poverty point but some has been found made from local clay and earth far more common are soapstone bowls these were far more durable than pottery for cooking since they could withstand the thermal shock much better what makes these soapstone bowls so interesting is that soapstone is not local to the area these soapstone bowls came all the way from georgia and they are found in gigantic quantities that dwarf the amount of local pottery and while we're on the subject of non-local stone i need to confess something remember earlier when i said that poverty point had everything its residents needed well that's actually not true there was one vital resource that the site of poverty point completely lacked stone in fact there is no local stone in the area whatsoever what how do hunter-gatherers depended on stone tools live in a place without any stone well they just imported huge amounts of it all the stone tools that poverty point and there are a lot of them are made from non-local material the closest source of stone is 150 miles away but plenty of other materials came from places such as arkansas indiana illinois and georgia stones such as chert gray flint copper and quartzite intended for tools would have arrived in raw or very basically fashioned forms so that they could be turned into points scrapers drills hoes plummets and other objects the array of different tools is dazzling you could almost say that poverty point was a tech hub for all the different tools that were produced from various materials from what we can tell these goods weren't hoarded by an elite but were made available to everyone that needed them the nature of this long-distance trade is not fully understood did foreigners come to poverty point to peddle their wares were these actually sought out by poverty point citizens on their own accord or were they just passed from one neighboring group to another until they reached poverty point and stopped no one is certain nor archaeologists certain of what was being given in return no poverty point artifacts are found in these far-off areas food is a possibility but fresh food would have likely spoiled on a return trip so who knows with such a large population and access to food and raw material poverty point's culture flourished decorative personal objects like beads and tubes have been found at the site also present are clay figurines most appear to be androgynous although there are some pregnant female figures which may mean that they have something to do with fertility none of these are especially numerous but they do show that art was being created and that people were adorning themselves one of the most striking artifacts are red jasper owls that have been found not just at poverty point but elsewhere throughout the south in small numbers the purpose of these owls is a mystery but they probably represent religious or spiritual objects unfortunately no burials survive at poverty point this could be due to the poor preservation conditions at the site that i mentioned earlier but it could also be an indication that the people there did not bury their dead but may have cremated them burials are usually a key source of information and having none at poverty point limits what we can glean about their society and culture now poverty points culture was not just confined to the city limits but stretched beyond it poverty point's immediate community stretched 50 miles north and south and several miles east and west beyond that heartland were other contemporary communities these are identifiable by the presence of ppos similar stone points and tools and art some of these sites even have mounds and earthworks of their own although none rise to the heights and complexity of poverty points good examples of these contemporaries are up the river at the bon edie bartholomew sites and the jaketown site in the yazoo swamp similar tools and objects can even be found as far away as the gulf of mexico most notably at the claiborne site oddly though the degree of influence and similarities is very uneven throughout the lower mississippi claiborne is a bit of an exception and some nearby sites such as catahoula have very little in common with poverty point despite being right along their trade routes it appears that some peoples opted into relationships with poverty point while others remain distant and detached despite these contemporaries poverty point was a place unlike any other at the time in many ways it was a city of contradictions at first glance it seems like just an impressive complex of indian mounds and yet the first people to dig into the soil were left scratching their heads a city without farming massive monuments that were erected quickly sedentary hunter-gatherers all of these seem unbelievable and that's what makes poverty point so special after the site was abandoned after centuries of occupation around a thousand bce north america never saw its like again for over a thousand years i'll repeat what i said earlier poverty point looks like an anomaly but we should see it for what it is an apogee if you live in louisiana or mississippi or happen to be passing through i encourage you to stop by and visit the site and show your appreciation for ancient sites in north america like a lot of other ancient sites in the united states it deserves far more attention than it gets even though it's a national monument and a unesco world heritage site so get out there and show poverty points some love and on that note i bit you farewell take care until next time and don't forget to like and subscribe for more ancient american content see you later [Music] you

Channel: Ancient Americas

Views: 111,601

Rating: 4.8991241 out of 5

Keywords: Poverty Point, poverty, point, archaic, ancient, america, americas, native, american, mounds

Id: 5kwXmjEbav8

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020