Poverty Point

Poverty Point is a collection of earthwork mounds and ridges situated next to Bayou Maçon in Louisiana. It has features that make it unique among Native American sites, and there are still many questions surrounding its purpose and construction.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Hi'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. We mentioned
in our recent episode on Marie and tal Teeth that
I had been looking for some Native American history to

(00:23):
do for the podcast. It had been a while since
we had talked about any Native American history, and in
that looking around process, I stumbled across an article on
ka Hokio, which is the Mississippian city that was, in
the words of Unesco, the largest and earliest pre Columbian
city north of Mexico. So naturally I got really excited.

(00:45):
I found almost instantly two problems with doing an episode
on coki At. One is that Sarah and Bablina did
one already in and the other is that there is
some debate about whether we should really call Cohokia America's
first city. And one of the reasons for that debate
is the subject of today's episode, um which is Poverty Point.

(01:08):
And so to get this out of the way right
at the beginning, Poverty Point is named for a nineteenth
century plantation in the area. The name has nothing to
do at all with the Native people who live there,
or their culture or the site itself. Um, it's just
sort of wound up with that name over the years,
and occasionally they talk about changing the name to something
that's more appropriate for what is actually being studied there. Uh,

(01:33):
but that's where we are. So Poverty Point has a
few things in common with Cohokia. They're both situated in
the Mississippi River Valley. Cahokia is a lot farther north
and also much closer to the river. So Cahokia is
in what's now Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri,
and Poverty Point is in the northeast corner of Louisiana,

(01:56):
adjacent to Bayou Mason, and both of them are known
for their earthworks. Those are large mounds that were created
by moving baskets of soil from one place to another.
But Poverty Point is much much older than Kahokia, and
it's also less clear exactly how people used the site

(02:17):
at Poverty Point, but some things about it are really
unique among Native American sites. So that is what we
are going to talk about today. So Poverty Point, as
Tracy just mentioned, is a collection of earthwork mounds and
ridges situated next to Baioux Masson. These were built between
three thousand, six hundred and three thousand, one hundred years

(02:40):
ago during North America's Archaic period, and some of the
site's earthworks were built over generations, whereas others were built
by a large group of laborers over a short period
of time. They also incorporate some of the mound structures
and measurement techniques of older civilizations that actually lived in
the area before the arrival of the Poverty Point culture.

(03:02):
It's estimated that it took about five million hours of
labor to build all of Poverty Points earthworks. This required
people to move fifty three million cubic feet of soil,
which would have been carried from one place to another
in baskets that would have weighed about fifty pounds apiece winfull.

(03:22):
The site has six ridges, which are divided by five
roads into six sections, as well as six mounds. The
ridges form a pattern of concentric seas which are only
visible from the air. They're taller than a grown adult,
and their peaks are between fifty and ninety paces apart.
The longest of the ridges is three quarters of a

(03:43):
mile long between the ridges are troughs where at least
some of the dirt came from that built them. These
ridges curve away from a bend in the Buyou and
they end at the bluff that drops down to the bayou.
It's a pretty steep drop. The aisles that divide the
ridges into sections were made either by digging trenches through

(04:04):
some of the spots or by leaving gaps during their
construction and others and these uh these sort of paths
lead out from a central plaza like spokes from a hub.
The central plaza is circular, and it's flat, and it's
marked with a lot of post holes of varying sizes,
although nobody has really worked out if there's a pattern

(04:24):
to them or not. It was probably used as a
gathering place as well as for ceremonial purposes. In addition
to the ridges and the plaza, there are six mounds
at the site, and it's not completely clear what they
were all used for, but unlike many of the other
mounds in North America, they were not used for burials.

(04:44):
Based on the artifacts left behind, some of them probably
did have more religious or our spiritual ceremonial purposes. Though
the area's first occupants at least during the period that
we're going to discuss, Uh probably lived at Owned B.
This is a mound that was created, used for a while,
and then covered over with a new top, and this

(05:06):
happened repeatedly. A final cap of earth was placed over
the mound about three thousand, four hundred years ago, after
which point the mound appears not to have been used anymore.
Poverty points ridges were started at about the same time
as Mound B was capped off. The largest of the mounds,
known as Mound A, was built last, and it was

(05:28):
built in what was at the time basically a swamp.
But about three thousand, three hundred years ago people started
burning off all the vegetation and burying what was left
under a layer of silt, and then the mound is
built on top of that silt layer. And Mound A
is twenty two high at its highest point, so that's
about seventy two ft or roughly seven stories. At its longest,

(05:53):
it's about two long or six d and eighty nine ft.
Mound A is shaped roughly like a he and some
archaeologists believe it was meant to be representative of a bird.
It would have taken more than ten million baskets of
earth to make that mound, and you have to be
more than one thousand feet in the air to actually
see it all. All of these numbers sound just huge,

(06:16):
and they really are. Mound Tea alone contains almost two
hundred and forty thousand cubic meters of earth, and the
only earthworks in the Eastern United States that that's larger
than Mound A is Monks Mound and Khokia, which you
can hear about in Sarah and Deeblina's Old episode. Mound
A is more than twice as big as the next

(06:37):
biggest mound that was built at about the same time,
and it's fifty times bigger than the average earthworks from
the period. What makes this even more stunning is that,
based on how the bottom layers of earth and Mound
A settled, it's likely that it was built really quickly,
especially compared to the others which took generations. Based on

(06:59):
an estimate of ninety days to build it, the labor
force needed to build Mound A was more than one
thousand people. Logically, the laborers would have had children and
people on the site who were doing other work besides
the building, so the overall population there for that estimated
ninety days was maybe roughly four thousand. There's no sign

(07:20):
of homes on mound, a people didn't live on it,
and it's generally thought to have been more ceremonial. It's
definitely possible that the entire complex had religious or magical significance,
given the way different parts of it line up with
one another, and the repetitions of the number six, and
a lot of the various artifacts um that uh that

(07:43):
people have found around the site, and those are what
we were going to talk about. After a brief word
from a sponsor. That sounds like a capital idea, So
to get back to poverty Point. People have found all
kinds of artifacts at Poverty Point. The first mention of
the place in writing is from the eighteen thirties, and
this is when a settler had heard that there was

(08:04):
lead in the area and he went looking for a
lead mine. He was thinking he was going to open
up the mind mine a bunch of lead, that was
how he was going to make his fortune. What he
actually found was, in his words, an Indian village, and
there were artifacts that scattered all over the ground. And
this lead was really galeno, which is a type of
lead ore and that had been shaped into adornments, so

(08:27):
there was no mind there. He was extremely disappointed. When
the first real archaeological study of Poverty Points started in
nineteen twelve, people found an abundance of artifacts. The overwhelming
majority of them were on the ground, with many more
just under the surface. Local people had also been finding
and collecting these artifacts, some of which have now been

(08:48):
turned over for study. The most common object found at
Poverty Point has been named the Poverty Point object, and
these are baked earthenware balls that were used as cooking stones.
And there's all kinds of variety and exactly how Poverty
Point objects are shaped and in what kind of designs
were etched onto them before they were baked and hardened.

(09:09):
But they fall into three main categories, which are balls, ropes,
and bicones. So to use them, people would heat these
objects in a fire and then they would transfer them
into earthen ovens for cooking. Different shapes and sizes of
the balls definitely hold heat at different temperatures and for
different lengths of time, so this was most likely used

(09:30):
deliberately to control the time and temperature of cooking. Also,
in the realm of cooking. There is some pottery at
Poverty Point, but overwhelmingly the vessels there are made from stone.
One cache of broken vessels at the site contained almost
three thousand pieces, which probably came from between two hundred

(09:51):
and three hundred stone vessels. So shifting away from the
cooking and edables arena, next up, we're going to talk
about weapons and their parts. There are lots of projectile
points and darts made from stone. Darts and spears were
thrown using a tool called an addle addle. There are
also lots of stone weights to give the addle addle

(10:11):
more heft so the projectiles would go farther. Also in
the category of weights, Poverty Point is full of plummets,
and these are stones that were carved into drop like
shapes which were used as weights on fishing nets. There
are also tools all over Poverty Points, so we're talking
about axes, ads, as, drills and the like, and a

(10:34):
lot of these are stone tools made for working with stone,
both to make more tools and a shape stone into
more ceremonial and ornamental objects. These objects include beads, a
lot of little potbellied owl figurines, which are my favorite.
They're they're very charming. They're super charming. Um. There are

(10:54):
human figurines which are mostly kind of androgynous. There are
also tubes that are made of a substance called less
as well as one's made from stone. It's not completely
clear whether these were used as pipes for smoking things
or whether they were used in ceremonies in some way,
but there are a number of them from around the site.

(11:15):
We have talked about stone so much already in this podcast. Uh.
And in addition to all these tools, weapons, vessels, and ornaments,
there's also stone along the tops of the ridges, more
than seventy metric tons of it. But here's the thing,
there's literally no natural stone existing at Poverty Point. To

(11:35):
find stone locally, people at Poverty Point would have had
to travel at least fifty kilometers and that would have
been a two day trip. Even if people had been
traveling along the water at that point. Between half and
three quarters of the stone at Poverty Point actually isn't local.
It's from way more than fifty kilometers away. A big
portion of it is from more than a thousand kilometers away.

(11:58):
And that's might have you scratching your head if this
is the first you've heard of it. It is one
of those revelations that will give pause. And we're going
to talk about how that all uh came to be
after our own pause for a quick word from a sponsor,
so to return to all the stone at Poverty Point,
all these axes and adornments and at Lattlewits, and all

(12:20):
of all of the stuff they were made from stone
and other materials that was not native to the Poverty
Point site. All these various types of stone and flint
and ore that were used to craft things that Poverty
Point came from all over the Mississippi River Valley all
the way up to the Great Lakes, and some of
the sources for stone and or were from much farther

(12:41):
east and west. The cash of vessel fragments we mentioned
earlier came mostly from the Appalachian Mountains. They also got
soap stone from what's now Georgia and quart site from
what's now Alabama. At the same time, the goods that
were made at Poverty Point made their way out into
the rest of the Mississippi River vaal y and the
southeast as well. Poverty Point objects are found in archaeological

(13:05):
sites all over this region. There are also six different
styles of weapon points and knives found at Poverty Point.
These are also distributed around the surrounding area at various
archaeological sites, but unlike at Poverty Point, these sites tend
to have just one or two styles, not the vast array.
All of this collected together points to the idea that

(13:28):
Poverty Point was a gathering place for lots of people
and a vibrantly active trading ground. People brought stone and
lots of it from very far away and then returns
to where they had came from with with items from
Poverty Point. It's entirely possible that food was also part
of Poverty Points trade, but that's a little bit more

(13:49):
difficult to document. They definitely had an abundance of fish, deer,
and nuts to hunt and gather, and we do know
that these foods were staples in the diet at Poverty
Point itself. It's a lot harder to track whether somebody
got some fish and took it back with them and
then ate it. Yeah, not not as easy to maintain

(14:11):
those historical records. So here's where things really move into
the weird not sure territory. At Poverty Point, we know
lots of people came to the site to trade that
there's this clear documentation in the archaeological record of massive
amounts of trading from very far away, but we're really
not sure how many people, if any, lived there permanently.

(14:34):
For example, archaeologists suspect that people lived along the ridges,
but no archaeological evidence has turned up yet for homes there.
It's entirely possible that homes were made from materials that
decayed over time, and the site was repeatedly plowed and
used for farming for at least a century, so that
could have easily destroyed some evidence. Even so, the presence

(14:56):
the presence of zero evidence of houses is a bit
the head scratcher. Uh. The idea that people lived along
the ridges comes from the presence of middens basically trash
deposits along the slopes of the ridges, along with the
type and number of artifacts that are found along the
ridges themselves. There's also no evidence of any burials at

(15:17):
Poverty Point, which is something you would expect if people
were living there full time. The only exception is that
Mound B was built over the remains of a fire,
and at least one body had been burned in that fire,
but it's not entirely clear who that person was, or
when it happened, or how that was related to other
events at Poverty Point. Basically, there is too much trash

(15:39):
on the site for it to have just been a
seasonal trading ground that would have been left vacant for
long stretches of the year, and the lack of burial
sites makes it unlikely that it was a year round
home for as many people as the size of the
site would be able to support, So it remains a
bit of a mystery. These two things kind of leave
a lot of question mark. It seems like maybe there

(16:00):
are some people who were there all the time and
uh many many others who came to trade, But that's
there's a lot of theory and not a lot of
clear evidence for which might be the right one. It's
also a bit of a mystery exactly who these people were.
There's not a specific known Native American tribe that's been

(16:22):
tied to the construction of the mounds at Poverty Point
or to all of the things that went on there. Instead,
archaeologists have come up with a set of hallmarks that
they used to define what's called Poverty Point culture, and
this includes Poverty Point objects, projectile points and knives, lots
of raw materials being used from really far away uh,

(16:44):
creating of beads and plummets, and an overall hunter gatherer
type of existence, especially relying on fish, deer, and nuts.
And so this culture stretched roughly from Memphis to the
Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi River valley. However, some
of these hallmarks, such as the Poverty Point objects, travel

(17:06):
well and the last a very long time, So it's
important not to just suppose that every hunter gatherer society
that hunted with projectiles and used Poverty Point objects was
necessarily part of Poverty Point culture. On the last kind
of mind blowing thing that I feel like there are
many mind blowing things, or at least things that blew
my mind in this episode. Um archaeologists used to think

(17:29):
that because of the huge complexity and engineering scale of
the mounds and ridges, and because of all that non
local sourcing of the stone that they needed, but the
Poverty Point people must have been an agricultural society sort of.
The society would have had to develop to the point
of being able to sustain agriculture before being able to
do all of these other things. But more recent research

(17:52):
really undoes that idea. We just don't have the archaeological
evidence of agriculture going on at the site, and the
amount of labor and time that it would have taken
to raise all of these mounds couldn't really have happened
if the you know, the same or more amount of
labor was also required to raise crops and take care
of domestic animals. So, basically, based on the evidence we have,

(18:16):
and contrary to what people supposed about what hunter gatherer
societies were capable of doing, the people at Poverty Point
or hunter gatherers who built these massively large and complex
engineering feats, which are actually unique in the Native American world.
There's no other ridge structure like the one at Poverty

(18:37):
Point that's been found anywhere else. They also appear to
have been a really egalitarian culture, so they shared their
labor and their resources, even though the site where they
lived was the biggest in the region. They don't seem
to have been wealthier than the surrounding communities. There doesn't
even appear to have been any kind of wealth disparity

(18:57):
among the people who lived in or visited Poverty Point.
There has to have been some kind of leadership or
at least management, because that would have been necessary to
plan and manage all of the building of these ridges
and mounds, especially the ones that went The construction went
on for years and years um. But we have no
textiles surviving from the site and definitely no written records.

(19:20):
So all of that goes back into the realm of
theory and conclusions drawn from the archaeological evidence that we have.
In addition to all these other question marks about some
of the specifics of the people's in the life at
Poverty Point, we also don't know why people eventually left
Poverty Point. One possible explanation is that when Poverty Point

(19:43):
was in use, there may have been a lake adjacent
to the site which was used for fishing. Uh. We
know that fish are definitely abundant in those parts of
the waterways, and that they were a dietary staple, so
if the lake had dried up, there would not have
been enough to feed anybody anymore, and that could have
caused them to exit. The State of Louisiana bought four
hundred acres of the site in two I'm sure when

(20:07):
we put this on our Facebook page, someone will put
the Aliens guy from the History Channel ship on there. Um. Yes, indeed,
because there's just a whole lot of This was a
massively impressive archaeological feat, and we are not sure exactly
who built it or why Aliens. I don't actually think

(20:30):
it was Aliens. I always think it's really cool when
researchers have an idea in their minds about how society
functioned and then they find something that undoes that whole idea. Like,
you know, societies must have progressed to being able to
farm things agriculturally before they are sophisticated enough to do
these other things. Oh, actually, no, that seems not to

(20:53):
be the case. This brings back um such fond memories
of when I was a kid in school and I
grew up part of the time in northwest Florida, and
we visited uh An Indian Mound as one of our
field trip. Yes, we had, but it was nothing comparable.
We had. We had a mound where we visited near

(21:15):
where I grew up that was called Town Creek Indian Mound,
and that is still what it is called today because
I looked it up. Uh And that is a place
that some of the mounds were used as burial sites.
And then nearer ish to Atlanta is Ottawa Mounds, which
I think also some of them were used as burial sites.
So having had these normally enormous mounds that were not

(21:37):
burial sites was another thing. Um, it was sort of
foreign to me. And this whole idea, along with the
idea of living somewhere where there's no stone everywhere I
have ever lived as very rocky, and so I was like,
what do you mean there is no stone in the
Stone Age Society's home. It does, uh sort of cause

(21:58):
you to have to shift your thinking of out how
that could exist and be a thing, because I, like you,
I'm like, what what? What? No stone at all? Are
you sure that? I've been wondering if it was hyperbole?
But you know, all of these respectable archaeologists were saying
over and over that there was no stone. They would
have had to go fifty kilometers to get stone. Really okay?

(22:23):
So Uh, I also have some listener mail. We got
several listener mail slash tweet slash Facebook messages after our
series on China under Chairman Mao Um of people asking uh,
how people in China now think about these events or

(22:43):
more personal stories about UM, what people experienced who were
living in China at the time, and we have gotten
the other listener mail that answers some of those questions.
So I'm going to read from one of them today,
and this is from Coco Um and Coco says, most
of my not ledge of the Cultural Revolution comes from
my parents, who were born in the fifties. I grew

(23:03):
up in China during the nineties, and while the Cultural
Revolution was in the textbooks, all the blame were placed
on the Gang of Four. My dad's father was imprisoned
during that time. I don't know the details because it's
still a very sensitive topic with my dad. He was
horribly bullied as a child because his father was a
counter revolutionary. From what I've been able to gather, my

(23:25):
grandfather worked as a professor. Together with some of his colleagues,
he participated in the one hundred Flowers campaign and was
subsequently labeled a rightist and counter revolutionary. According to my grandmother,
one of his students was also imprisoned at the same place.
The student later died in prison of a possible suicide.
About the one hundred Flowers campaign, there are a few

(23:47):
Chinese articles that mentioned my grandfather and according to one
of them, the campaign was really a trap to lure
dissenters into exposing themselves. Given how things turned out, I'm
inclined to believe in this conspiracy theory this one time.
My grandmother also told me stories of the famine. Still,
there were times when the food shortage was so bad
that people resorted to eating tree barks. The university that

(24:09):
my grandmother worked at had a lot of trees along
at streets, and I think during one winter when food
was particularly scarce, people would stripe one type of tree
in particular because it's barks tasted the least bitter. My
mother's family had a slightly easier time during the Cultural Revolution.
They lived in the south, where there was more food.
They also lived in a more rural area where they

(24:30):
had a small plot of land where they planted food.
They were also more well off to begin with. And
how the Cultural Revolution is viewed there does seem to
be an urban slash world divide. Since people most likely
to write about history in China are the urbanite intellectuals,
the general impression is overwhelmingly negative. However, I have Chinese
friends with parents from rural areas who tend to have

(24:53):
much rosier views of the events. One of my parents
friends was sent to the countryside as an educated youth
and became an elementary cool teacher while he was there.
He said that without the down to the countryside movement,
the children in the rural areas during that time would
have had a much worse education, simply because without the
government mandate, educated young people would not be in the
countryside teaching first graders. I do have the Cultural Revolution

(25:16):
to thank for my existence. Though my parents met while
they were in university. My dad's three years older than
my mom, and the reason they went to the university
at the same time was that because during the Cultural Revolution,
post secondary education was inaccessible for most people, they basically
both took their exams in the same year, even though
he was older than she was, and that's how they
wound up in school together. And one last thing, I

(25:37):
have a pet theory that the current brain drain that
China is experiencing were many highly educated or wealthy Chinese
are immigrating, is at least in part a legacy of
the Cultural Revolution. From my own very formal and very
unscientific survey of my Chinese Canadian friends, the majority of
us come from families that are of the five black categories.
I think many of us emigrated not just for the

(25:57):
usual reasons seeking a better at life, etceter, but also
because even though we did have a good life in China,
we don't trust that it will last. UM. So thank
you Coco for sending us that personal story about how
the cultural Revolution affected your family. We got several of those, um,
and I'm kind of spreading them out to read them.

(26:18):
There are some others that I hope to read one day,
but that a lot of them are very tragic, and
so I don't want to love them all together. If
you would like to write to us, we're at History
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss industry and on
Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is Missinistry dot
tumbler dot com, and are on Pinterest at pinterest dot

(26:40):
com slash miss in History. We have a spreadshirts store
at miss Industry dot spreadshirt dot com where you can
get all kinds of hoodies and t shirts and phone
cases and things. Um. And if you would like to
learn more about what we've talked about today, you can
come to our website or our parent companies website, which
is how stuff Works dot com and put the word
pottery in the third bar. Then you will find some

(27:01):
information about pottery, including the history of pottery, which ties
into what we've talked about today a little bit. And
you can come to our website where you can find
all of our episodes, including a handy archive of all
of them back to the beginning, and show notes probably
episodes that is at missed in history dot com. So
you can do all that and a whole lot more

(27:22):
at how stuff works dot com and missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff works dot com.