Geoarchaeology at Jaketown

Toward the end of the Archaic Period in eastern North America (approximately 3800-3000 years ago), earthen mound construction, extensive long-distance trade, technological developments, and elaboration of lapidary arts reached unprecedented scales among the hunter-gatherers of the Poverty Point culture, centered on the Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana. Research at the site has helped reveal the extremely high degree of organizational complexity attainable by hunter-gatherer societies and expanded our conceptions of the variable social and economic configurations expressed by groups that rely on hunting, fishing, and collecting for their subsistence.

Lee Arco is currently engaged in dissertation research at the Jaketown site in the Yazoo Basin of Mississippi, which is the second largest extant Poverty Point settlement. The ongoing project at Jaketown explores the occupation chronology, intra-site stratigraphy, and geomorphologic history of site. In addition to refining our understanding of the second largest Poverty Point settlement, the project constitutes a first step toward expanding our regional understanding of Poverty Point society and our knowledge of human-landscape interactions during this interval of time.

Excavation and soil/sediment coring have been conducted at the site to examine the chronology of Poverty Point occupation and the age of previously uninvestigated mounds at the site. The stratigraphy of the site is also being examined to help reconstruct changes in the site’s landscape and the environmental setting during different phases of prehistoric human occupation. Recent studies in the Tensas Basin of northeast Louisiana have identified evidence of catastrophic flooding and large-scale changes in the Mississippi River system between 3000 and 2500 years ago, which are thought to be implicated in the dissolution of the Poverty Point culture approximately 3000 years before the present. These events are also believed to be linked to a 500-year gap in occupation within many areas of the Lower Mississippi Valley and to the pronounced cultural differences between the Poverty Point and the succeeding Early Woodland inhabitants of the region. Through evaluating archaeological and environmental data sets from Jaketown, we develop insights into the unique Poverty Point hunter-gatherer culture and provide a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of how human behavior was influenced and/or structured/constrained by the dynamic alluvial environment of the Lower Mississippi Valley. This work is a collaborative project with Dr. Anthony Ortmann at Murray State University.

Publications

Arco, Lee J.:

2009            Project 04-022-07: Final Report on the 2007 Fieldwork Conducted at the Jaketown Site (22HU505) Humphreys County, Mississippi. Submitted to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Archaeological Conservancy, January 30, 2009

2009            Project 05-091-08: Preliminary Report on the 2008 Fieldwork Conducted at the Jaketown Site (22HU505) Humphreys County, Mississippi. Submitted to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Archaeological Conservancy, April 20, 2009

Presentations

Arco, Lee J.:

2007            Jaketown Revisited, Again. Paper presented at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Knoxville, TN

2009            Poverty Point Archaeology at Jaketown: Recent Investigations and Preliminary Results. Joint Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Archaeological Association and the Louisiana Archaeological Society, Natchez, MS

2009            The Geoarchaeology of Poverty Point Settlement at Jaketown: Recent Research and Preliminary Results. Paper presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Atlanta, GA.