As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Poverty Point is an archaeological site north of New Orleans that experts believe was a major trading center between 1700 and 1100 B.C.
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A new study suggests that the impressive 1.5-square-mile site is the work of an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, contrary to previous belief.
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Artifacts found in the Midwest and Southeastern United States appear to confirm that Poverty Point was a major trading center.
Civilization emerged around 1,500 B.C. real Start taking off. Ancient Egypt was entering a golden age known as the New Kingdom, the Hittites were taking root in the Middle East, the Shang dynasty came to power in China, and the Olmecs were rising in the tropical lowlands that would become Mexico. Meanwhile, in the lower Mississippi Valley, some 350 miles from the mouth of North America’s largest river, hunter-gatherers in an emerging egalitarian society were building one of the oldest and most impressive earthwork monuments in the Western Hemisphere.
Known today as Poverty Point – the name originated in 19thCentury plantation located near the archaeological site, this approximately 3,500-year-old building (built between 1700 and 1100 BC) is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While the size of the site is certainly impressive, stretching about 1.5 square miles, these ancient peoples return The equivalent of 140,000 dump trucks can be moved without the use of horses or even wheels.
Poverty Point has long been known to be a kind of trading center for ancient hunter-gatherers throughout the southeastern and midwestern United States, but a new study published in the journal Southeast Archeology— Archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) revisit the origin story of this impressive site, asking Why Ancient people first built these mounds.
Often, years-long intentional construction of monuments is the result of a hierarchy, like the pharaohs who ruled Egypt, the kings who ruled the Hittites, and the Chinese rulers who ruled their subjects. But Kidd and his co-author Seth Grooms, a former University of Washington doctoral graduate and member of the Lumbee tribe in North Carolina, argue that Poverty Point is the result of an egalitarian civilization responding to the region’s increasing severity of severe weather and massive flooding.
This goes against the previous view that this society must also have been hierarchical in nature, similar to the society that built Cahokia Mounds a thousand years later near present-day St. Louis, Missouri.
“Westerners don’t think they’re going to travel long distances and do all this work unless they get economic value from it,” study co-author Tristram Kidder said in the University of Washington journal. &symbol. “We believe they feel a moral responsibility to repair a broken universe.”
One of the key pieces of evidence that Poverty Point had some spiritual significance is that there has never been archaeological evidence of a permanent dwelling at the site. “The old model of people living at the point of poverty for centuries has broken down and we need a new framework,” Kidd told us &symbol.
Instead, they found materials such as quartz crystals from Arkansas, soapstone from northern Georgia and Great Lakes copper flakes. Kidd and Grooms argue that poverty spots were temporary gathering places where thousands of people gathered to do the things humans do: socialize, trade, worship, and work. As Grooms notes in another article, this makes Poverty Point somewhat of a historical outlier in the ancient world. &symbol 2023.
“These people came together to build these incredible monuments, and based on archaeological evidence, they did it without any institutional hierarchy, wealth differentials or intensive agricultural systems,” Grooms said at the time. “All of these were once thought to be prerequisites for social complexity.”
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