The monumental earthworks at Poverty Point were built by laborers who carried 300,000 cubic yards of dirt in fifty-pound baskets. The site’s hallmark feature is the six concentric, semi-circular rings surrounding an interior plaza. Scale model by KiwiMill LLC. Photography by John Smillie.
Quick! What do the pyramids in Egypt, the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall in China, and the earthen mounds at Poverty Point, Louisiana, have in common? They are all recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites—natural and cultural sites of outstanding universal value, determined to be important to the whole of humanity and worthy of protection for present and future generations.
Poverty Point is only the twenty-second World Heritage Site in the U.S. The five hundred-acre archaeological site, already designated a National Monument in 1962, was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site this June after a lengthy designation process. “The nomination process is long and something the department (the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism) has been working on for at least eight years,” said Cami Geisman, deputy communications director.
To be included on the World Heritage list, sites must “be of outstanding universal value” and meet at least one of ten criteria that include considerations of culture, history, technology, cultural geography, aesthetic value, geology, and/or biodiversity. “A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into the presentation and into the nomination,” said Geisman.
Poverty Point is one of the most amazing Native American earthworks in the Western Hemisphere and also among the oldest. Its discovery has altered the way historians view the evolution of society in the New World.
Before its discovery, the Middle East was considered the cradle of civilization. But at nearly the same time as the pyramids were being built in Egypt, people in the New World were building cities, establishing trade routes that crossed thousands of miles, and creating a complex society in an age in the New World that predated agriculture. Hunter-gatherers, previously considered by archaeologists and anthropologists not to have a complex enough social structure to pull off monumental engineering, were leaving their mark on history in a spectacular fashion.
I’d never heard of Poverty Point until a few years ago when someone mentioned it in passing. But that name! It’s kind of wonderful, isn’t it? It sounds like the name of a scary movie. Cape Fear. Poverty Point. And so my first question on arrival was to ask about the name.
Situated in northeastern Louisiana a few miles outside the town of Delhi along the banks of Bayou Maçon, the site was named after Poverty Point Plantation, a nineteenth-century farm that belonged to Phillip Guier, who settled in northeast Louisiana in 1832 with his wife, Sarah. He acquired the land in 1843, and, in 1851, the plantation became known as Poverty Point or Hard Times Plantation.
“Mr. Guier moved down here from Kentucky,” said David Griffing, Poverty Point Site supervisor. “There was actually a place up in Kentucky called Poverty Point,” he continued, “and we think maybe he named it that to make his wife feel more at home.”
While the mounds and artifacts at the site were well known, it wasn’t until 1953, when the discovery of a twenty-year-old aerial photograph revealed six concentric ridges in the shape of semicircles surrounding an open plaza, that people realized a significant treasure lay there. The man-made structure is so large it defies recognition from the ground and reveals evidence of a highly developed, ancient American culture.
All told, Poverty Point consists of six earthen mounds as well as the six enormous, nested, C-shaped ridges and a large, flat interior plaza that likely contained wooden posts arranged in circles. No other site in the world has a similar design.
The land had been farmed from the 1840s all the way into the 1970s, and plowing had leveled the ridges to only about a foot in height; but originally, they would have been between four and six feet high and about 140 to 200 feet apart. The two ends of the outermost ridge are nearly three quarters of a mile from one another. Laid end to end, they would stretch for seven miles.
The ridges served as living space: people built huts along their tops where they conducted their daily lives, manufacturing tools and preparing food. Though the population likely varied seasonally, it is thought that Poverty Point held from several hundred to as many as four thousand people year-round for as many as six hundred years.
At the center of the site is a plaza that covers about thirty-seven acres and is believed to have been used for ceremonies, rituals, dances, games, and other activities. On the western side of the plaza, archaeologists have discovered several deep holes arranged in circles of various sizes; they believe the holes held long poles, possibly serving as calendar markers. Also located within the plaza are Dunbar Mound and Sarah’s Mound, named after Sarah Guier, who is buried in it. Evidence suggests that Sarah’s Mound was constructed about one thousand years after the decline of the Poverty Point culture.
Outside the ridge enclosure are five other mounds. “The mounds probably served a variety of purposes,” said Don L. Gibson, Ph.D., in a 1999 video produced by the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism and LPB. “But their form and their particular location suggest that they were part of the protection system the Indians had set up to protect their way of life.
“They’ve got six mounds that form a square, or at least a partial square,” he said. “They’ve got six rings that form a semi-circle, so [it] looked like [there] were two methods of using some insurance to protect their activities inside. Southeastern Indians believed that geometry is the main protection against outside evil.”
Scientists believe the mounds were used for special activities or as gathering places for the elite.
A tram tour offers visitors a relaxing trip around the entire site, which, if hiked, is about two miles long. For the last day in August, the weather was unseasonably cool with an overcast sky—perfect for enjoying a ride narrated by our extremely knowledgeable guide, Park Ranger Cleon Crockett.
The largest mound—Mound A or The Bird Mound—is believed to be an effigy mound constructed in the shape of a bird in flight, headed due west. Today it is seventy-two feet high, and six hundred feet by eight hundred feet wide. Before three thousand years of erosion, however, this mound was probably over one hundred feet tall.
The Bird Mound was built by hunter-gatherers without the advantage of domesticated pack animals—essentially by hand. Laborers carried over 300,000 cubic yards of dirt in fifty-pound baskets, making well over 15.5 million trips from the borrow pit behind it. That would amount to about eighteen thousand dump truckloads of dirt.
Most amazing: archaeologists believe that Mound A was built within thirty to ninety days. Core samples taken from the mound show no evidence of grass or vegetation layers, nor is there evidence of leaching from rainfall or of residue left from earthworms, grubs, molds, or any other boring animals. That means that the mound was built in one continuous episode over a very short period of time—one season.
Riding around to the rear of Mound A, we emerged from a copse of woods to an open field. Ranger Crockett pointed across to the edge of the woods: “There’s a black bear, right across over there. See him? I can see him.”
As the bear lumbered quickly back into the shelter of the woods, I thought about the hunter-gatherers who found game so plentiful here. I imagined a Native American wrapped up warmly in a bearskin cloak during the cold winter months. No remains of clothing have ever been found, so what they wore is anyone’s guess.
Although no one knows exactly why the Poverty Point people settled where they did, they obviously liked the margins of ridges like the Maçon Ridge. This afforded them high ground, which kept the site dry during seasonal flooding and provided attractive living conditions adjacent to very rich bottomland forest, abundant with plants, wildlife, and fisheries.
Mound B is a domed mound. Although domed mounds were often used for burial, no excavations from Poverty Point have revealed burial sites. Mound E is a large, flat, square-shaped mound. Offsite sits Lower Jackson Mound, which is privately owned and is about 1,300 years older than Mound A. Mounds A, E, B, and Lower Jackson form a straight line that runs due north and south. It is believed that the Poverty Point people purposely aligned the later mounds with the Lower Jackson mound to form a north-south line.
Besides the enormous earthworks and mounds, another hallmark of the Poverty Point culture is long-distance trade. “In terms of the artifacts, Poverty Point probably contains just about every kind of artifact that was made by the archaic peoples in the eastern United States. It also has some artifacts that were not made by the general southeastern peoples or other eastern peoples,” said Gibson.
Since there were no local stones on the Maçon Ridge, rocks were major trade goods. Poverty Point residents acquired stones from the Ouachita, Ozark, and Appalachian mountains—even copper from the Great Lakes 1,400 miles away.
“Rivers were almost certainly used in bringing in the trade materials because we’re talking about such a massive volume of material. In fact, we’ve estimated over seventy-one metric tons of foreign flint occurs on the Poverty Point site,” said Gibson.
The predominance of fish and reptile bones at the site suggest most of their food came from slow-moving water. Indeed, archaeologists have discovered what at one time was a large lake where only farmland remains today.
Fishermen may have used cast-and-gill fishing nets weighted with plummets to cast out for the fish.
“You really don’t have to angle to catch fish. You can set out traps,” said Gibson. “It put an awful lot of food in their larders.”
Other game was also plentiful, including rabbit, deer, duck, geese, and turkey. Spears, arrowheads, cooking balls, tools, pottery, beads, ornaments, and effigies, among other artifacts, have been found in abundance at Poverty Point. Many of these items indicate a relatively complex social structure, in which commoners were differentiated from the elite. Examples can be found in the site’s main museum, which provides an eye-opening entrée into a civilization that had heretofore gone unnoticed.
Poverty Point’s new designation as a World Heritage Site is expected to attract many more tourists to northeast Louisiana. “This is a huge win for Louisiana. I don’t think people realize how impactful this will be to northeast Louisiana’s economy,” Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne said. “The World Heritage designation solidifies Poverty Point as one of the world’s greatest archaeological treasures.” t
Details. Details. Details.
Poverty Point State Historic Site
Located in West Carroll Parish, east of Monroe, on La. 577
LaStateParks.com • (888) 926-5492
Hours: 9 am–5 pm
Admission: $4, which provides access to the area museum, video, and seasonal tram tour. Children under twelve and senior citizens are admitted free.
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