Katherine Adelsberger
T.R. Kidder (white shirt) confers with Anthony Ortmann (left) and colleague Jon Gibson during excavations at Mound A.
New Thinking about Poverty Point
T
Recent research indicates the site’s largest mound was built much quicker than was previously thought.
The prehistoric earthworks at Poverty Point, built some 3,500 years ago on the edge of the Mississippi floodplain in northeastern Louisiana, include six concentric ridges and five mounds. The largest of these mounds, Mound A, stands 72-feet high and has a base almost the size of 10 football fields, making it the second-largest mound in North America. Considering that the people who built Poverty Point didn’t have organized agriculture, domesticated draft animals, or the wheel, it’s easy to assume mounds the size of modern buildings took decades, if not centuries, to build. That was the general theory among archaeologists, at least,
until T.R. Kidder of Washington University and Anthony Ortmann of Murray State University began excavating in 2001. Their results, published in Geoarchaeology, suggest that, in fact, Mound A rose from nothing in a matter of months. Without a single wheelbarrow, the people of Poverty Point may have moved enough soil to fill 31,217 modern dump trucks in as little as one month.The findings are making researchers re-think not only how many of the mounds across the Southeastern United States were built, but also what the hunter-gatherer societies that built them were really capable of.
By Julian Smith
american archaeology
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