Before the pyramids

We needed a break from the grimness so we drove across a bridge into a very rural and productive Arkansas then headed down into Louisiana, in welcome rain today, to find a world heritage site we had heard about. Still hugging the Mississippi.

Poverty Point. Called so after a plantation that used to be in the area. Poverty Point is a mound construction by primitive hunter-gatherers, before the time of the pyramids.  Way back.

The ancestors of the folk who built this came to this land across a land bridge from Asia, in times, aeons past, when the ice and waters allowed it. They made their way south, no doubt to warmer climes. They were hunter-gatherers, in the main.  They lived off the land, and built grass thatched huts with their finely sharpened axes and knives.  

At this place, though, for whatever reason, they built something extraordinary: an assortment of mounds and ridged embankments around a flat plaza semi-circle over a vast space.  As vast as the big pyramids, but without utilising animals or wheelbarrows in the technology as the pyramid workers did. In the graphic below the flat plaza area alone takes up some 37 1/2 acres.  So the area of the entire site is huge. 

Archeologists estimate that the inhabitants would have had to have numbered around 1500 at the height of the heaviest construction, and would have had to carry some 15.5 million baskets of dirt just to make this largest mound with its ceremonial access facing the plaza. And there are other mounds in the complex, though not as large as the central one. They probably dug the dirt with digging sticks. And carried the dirt in handwoven baskets on their back. One load at at time.  Amazing primitive man. Here in the delta of the Mississippi. 

Their artefacts, which have been found here, and displayed in the small but brilliant museum on site, show that even without using domesticated animals such as horses, they managed to trade far and wide for the goods they needed: across the Appalachians, far up to the northern lakes area, and way over to the mid west.  

The finds here have been in massive numbers, indicating quite a large organised population at times. The site was used for hundreds and thousands of years.  Likely for large special ceremonial occasions.  Signs of habitation at those times has been found around the ridges. It is always amazing to see what motivation and persistence can produce.  

Delta land is so close to the water table that the water has nowhere to go when it rains. It sits in its silver runnels so long.  Or builds up and floods. 

Finely edged implements

Image of the entire site.  The flat plaza surrounded by the ridges, the mounds at the back and sides

The largest mound likely had ceremonial steps to the flattened top  for access

Amazing primitive man

Exquisitely preserved.  This is just a tiny fraction of the massive number of spearpoints found on the site. There are many other objects including ornamental jewellery and decorated cooking stones.