point acquisition A HUB OF POVERTY POINT CULTURE

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A Hub of Poverty Point Culture

The Jaketown site in west-central Mississippi has yielded a plethora of unusual artifacts.

Covering nearly 200 acres, the Jaketown site is best known for its role as regional center of the Poverty Point culture in Mississippi’s Yazoo Basin. Located in Humphreys County, the site was occupied during every cultural period from just prior to the Poverty Point period (1730–1350 B.C.) through the Mississippian (A.D. 1400).

Surface collections from the Jaketown site include such items as jasper pendants and beads, magnetite and hematite plummets, engraved gorgets and tablets, and Poverty Point fired-clay objects believed to have been used for cooking. The site has also yielded hundreds of micro-lithic tools made from chert blades that are common Poverty Point artifacts. Archaeologists believe Jaketown inhabitants not only manufactured goods from imported materials such as steatite, hematite, and magnetite, but that they also played a major role in the redistribution of raw materials and finished items to surrounding Poverty Point sites.

Poverty Point culture sites have been recorded in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Poverty Point culture, named after the type site in northeast Louisiana, is defined primarily by certain tools and artifacts, many of which are made from imported materials obtained through extensive trade networks. Poverty Point sites were usually located on waterways, giving them the advantage of access to trade routes and

Mound B, one of Jaketown’s two extant mounds, is covered by the trees in the right of this photograph. The site’s other mounds have, for the most part, been leveled.

wetland environments teeming with game and fish. This was especially true of Jaketown, which 3,700 years ago was located on what was then the path of the Mississippi River.

Jaketown was first recorded in 1908 by legendary archaeologist C. B. Moore, but he was unable to obtain permission to excavate. The site wasn’t revisited until 1941, when James B. Griffin did an archaeological survey of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Excavations were conducted by Philip Phillips and Paul Gebhard in 1946, and James A. Ford and Warren Eames in 1951.

Their work revealed evidence of pre–Poverty Point occupation, overlaid by a substantial Poverty Point midden containing the unusual and exotic artifacts for which the culture is known. These strata were in turn covered by layers containing pottery from Early, Middle, and Late Woodland cultures and, finally, by artifacts and pottery from the Mississippian Period. One excavation trench even showed the remains of Poverty Point structures. This was especially important because very little is known about the houses people lived in so long ago. Both structures consisted of post mold patterns arranged in arcs, which suggests these early in-

(Left) A broken plummet found at Jaketown. A plummet is an artifact that’s believed to have been used as a weight in fishing nets. (Right) Chunks of magnetite and hematite, the materials Poverty Point people favored for fashioning plummets. Magnetite and hematite were imported from the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas.

habitants of Mississippi may have lived in circular houses, as opposed to the square structures of later Mississippian cultures.

Due to the excellent stratigraphy, excavations at Jaketown helped confirm the age of the Poverty Point culture. At the time, the antiquity of the Louisiana type site was in doubt. Late Archaic people were supposed to have been mobile hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups, and it was thought there couldn’t have been a sufficient number of people nor the social organization necessary to build large earthworks. But Jaketown helped prove that Poverty Point was in fact a distinct cultural occurrence that manifested itself in many parts of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Aside from the Louisiana type site, Jaketown is the largest Poverty Point site. Originally there were at least six mounds on the site. The two largest are believed to be from the Mississippian occupation; the rest are thought to date to the Poverty Point period. The mounds are arranged in a semicircle on the west bank of what is now Wasp Lake. Unfortunately, railroad construction and farming have taken a toll on the mounds. The site suffered the most damage during the 1940s and ’50s

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when the Mississippi Highway Department laid down a highway through the site and excavated a borrow pit on it. Today only the two Mississippian mounds are clearly visible. Fortunately, years of periodic flooding have deposited layers of sediment that protect the deep, earlier middens.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History currently owns 4.7 acres on the east side of the highway, where the Poverty Point house features were found, and a 7.6-acre tract on the west side containing the two Mississippian mounds. The remainder of the site is owned by individuals. Although privately owned, approximately 70 acres surrounding the Archives and History property is under a conservation easement, designed to protect historic properties. This portion of the site was sold to the Conservancy by owners Charles and Herbert Hill, who abided by the easement and dutifully protected their part of the site. Consequently, almost half of this important site is protected by the State of Mississippi and The Archaeological Conservancy. The remainder of Jaketown remains unprotected and is being cultivated.

Archaeological methods have greatly improved since the excavations at Jaketown. Very little is known about the Poverty Point culture in the Yazoo Basin. Hopefully, future study of Jaketown will provide answers regarding chronology, subsistence, site distribution, and trade networks of the Poverty Point period. —Jessica Crawford