16 Facts About Poverty Point

The Poverty Point site has been designated as a state historic site, US National Monument, a US National Historic Landmark, and UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Poverty Point site contains earthen ridges and mounds, built by indigenous people between 1700 and 1100 BCE during the Late Archaic period in North America.

Poverty Point has been the focus of professional archaeological excavations since the 1950s.

Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point consist of a series of earthen ridges, earthen mounds, and a central plaza.

Shallow borrow pits are located near Mound A Presumably the Poverty Point people carried dirt from those borrow pits and from elsewhere on the site to build the mound.

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Archaeologists such as Sherwood Gagliano and Edwin Jackson support the interpretation that Poverty Point was a site where groups came to meet and trade on an occasional basis.

People who lived at Poverty Point were Native Americans, descendants of the immigrants who came to North America across the Bering Strait land bridge approximately 20,000 to 23,000 years ago.

The people identified with the Poverty Point culture developed a distinct set of cultural traits different from other contemporary inhabitants in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Food sources of the people at Poverty Point came from the local animals and plant life in the region.

Poverty Point subsistence was broad-based due to the different seasonal foods that were available.

Inhabitants of Poverty Point produced small amounts of pottery, creating a variety of different types such as fiber-tempered, grog-tempered, and untempered with both the Wheeler and Old Floyd Tchefuncte design styles as decoration.

For example, cylindrical grooved Poverty Point Objects are the earliest form of the artifact type produced and biconical forms occur later in time.

However, modern scientific analyses demonstrate that at least some of the copper artifacts recovered from Poverty Point were made from materials available in the southern Appalachian Mountains where soapstone or steatite vessels at Poverty Point are sourced.

Poverty Point was investigated and described by Clarence B Moore in 1913, by Gerard Fowke of the Smithsonian Institution in 1926, by Clarence H Webb in 1935, and by Michael Beckman in 1946.

In 1960, John Griffin, who at the time was the Southeast Regional Archaeologist for the National Park Service, suggested to the Federal government that Poverty Point be declared and established as a national monument.

Poverty Point is a member of this prestigious group, alongside such cultural landmarks as Stonehenge in England, the Pyramid Fields at Giza in Egypt, and the Great Wall of China.