Place of Rings: Poverty Point (Archaeological site in Louisianna)

[Dover]

Indians in Louisiana: The Poverty Point Site



A Local Legacy
Why would anyone build mounds of earth 7 miles long?
In the case of Poverty Point, in northeastern Louisiana, no one knows for sure. In some states, like Ohio, Native American people built mounds as burial places. Archaeologists suspect that the mounds at Poverty Point served as sites for dwellings, but they are not certain. Native American culture in the Poverty Point area began almost 4,000 years ago, and the mounds were built between 1350 and 1800 B.C.

The mounds are six giant half-circles in the shape of a bull's-eye, almost three-fourths of a mile wide. If you straightened out the six mounds and laid them out end-to-end, they would stretch for 7 miles. Archaeologists believe the 37-acre central plaza formed by the mounds may have been used for religious and other public ceremonies.

Although archaeologists have not found any articles of clothing from these ancient people, they have found jewelry. The great variety of this jewelry, from simple to elaborate, indicates that social status was important in the Poverty Point community. Overall, Poverty Point presents evidence that ancient Americans lived in sophisticated communities. Even so, this does not help to solve the mystery of exactly what these mounds were. Do you have any other ideas?
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/es/la/mound_1
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Place of Rings: Poverty Point

From K. Kris Hirst,2000. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. ISBN 0-8130-1833-1. alkaline paper, cloth. 274 pp.; a glossary, and a bibliography.



Poverty Point: A Memoir

Jon L. Gibson's recent book on the archaic period earthwork called Poverty Point reads a bit like a memoir--not a memoir for Gibson, who has studied Poverty Point for nearly fifty years, but for the site itself.

Poverty Point is a large, C-shaped, 3500-year-old earthwork located on the Maçon Ridge in the Mississippi River trench in northeast Louisiana. The 3/4 mile long earthwork is composed of a complex of six nested rings around a central open space. Five aisles split the rings into six sections, and six mounds are located in the near vicinity. Archaeological evidence suggests that Poverty Point was a town for several hundred people, the ancestors of the Tunica-speaking Koroa, Tunica, and Tioux, people who fished and hunted and gathered to feed themselves and, in their off hours, built a highly planned, beautiful piece of engineering work using baskets of earth..cont'd
http://archaeology.about.com/od/northamerica/fr/povertypoint.htm
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Amateur uncovers oldest Indian mounds in Americas


MONROE, La. (AP) The Indian mounds deep in the northeast corner of Louisiana don't look like much. Two guys with a backhoe and bulldozer might have needed a day or so to shove dirt into that oval of mounds and ridges.

Until a timber company clear-cut the trees and thickets at Watson Brake in 1981, nobody even realized they had been built to create a greater shape. And it took nearly two decades after that to discover that they are the oldest known grouping of mounds in the Western Hemisphere.

They might not have survived without the dogged crusade of a former Census Bureau worker and amateur archaeologist named Reca Jones.

The mounds and their purpose are a mystery, but they have become a touchstone for archaeologists studying the Middle Archaic period — around 6000 to 3000 B.C.

Work started a millennium before Tutankhamen was born. The much larger concentric series of earthworks about 100 km away at Poverty Point would not be built for 1,500 to 2,000 years. The Mayan pyramids in Central America and the Anasazi cliff dwellings in the American West were even further in the future.

"Many people thought the Middle Archaic was people running around doing hunter-gathering things for 3,000 years," said Mark Barnes, a National Park Service archaeologist. "They were much more sophisticated than we thought."

Jones had known since she was a child that there were a couple of old Indian mounds there.

Then Willamette Industries Inc., which owned half the site until the Archaeological Conservancy bought it in 1996, cut the trees. Suddenly Jones could see that there were more mounds than she had realized, with ridges connecting them into a giant egg shape. It was about 300 meters from end to end and 200 meters across.

"I was here almost the whole time Willamette was here, saying, 'Don't get on the mounds! Don't get on the mounds!'" Jones said. Willamette complied.

Then she asked a Harvard archaeologist to map the site with her, but he was interested in the ceramic age which began about 3,000 years ago. It wasn't until July 1993 that Joe Saunders, the state's archaeologist for that region, drilled the first sample....cont'd

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news171.htm

[aquart]

1. Nifty.

Why would they summer in Louisiana and go elsewhere for winter? I thought La was loathesome in summer?

[Mistwell]

2. Very cool stuff

I wonder...does anyone else have anything on these sites? I've never heard of them before (probably because I am a west coaster).

[Dover]

3. Do a google.......LOTS of stuff on this. I also found that my university

archeology department has several papers on it, so if it interests you then try your local university library or arch. dept.

And welcome to DU. Pull up a chair and stay awhile!:hi: