Poverty Point

Geoarchaeology of Earthen Mounds and Built Environments: Excavations at Poverty Point

We have been working at the Poverty Point site since the late 1990’s—first mapping and then doing coring and excavation. Research has been devoted to exploring the chronology, history, and social context of the earthworks at Poverty Point. We have tested all of the mounds at the site with the greatest effort devoted to work on Mound C and Mound A. Coring across parts of the site has been used to investigate landscape histories and to investigate site-wide stratigraphic associations. An affiliated project is examining the radiocarbon dates at Poverty Point using Bayesian statistical methods to try to tease out a coherent cultural chronology and to place the mounds and built environment into a chronological framework.

Results to date demonstrate the site has a stratigraphically and chronologically distinctive history that is divisible into at least two or more periods of activity. An initial era of settlement is found widely across the site and is dated to ca. 3600-3400 cal B.P. The only mound that was certainly built at this time was Mound B. Mound E may be contemporary or may predate the rest of the mounds. The ridges had not yet been built. An episode of intensive earthwork construction followed in the period 3400-3200 cal B.P. At this time the ridges were largely if not completely constructed and mound C was begun. Mound B was terminated by the erection of a final mantle that transformed it from a multi-stage flat-topped mound to a conical monument. The final construction activities at the site consisted of the termination of Mound C and the building of Mound A; the site was abandoned not long after Mound A was erected. Mound A was built over a low swampy depression and its construction involved a massive effort to build the mound in a very short period of time—estimated to be less than 90 days and possibly as little as 30 days.

Our work at Poverty Point allows us to develop a historical framework for understanding the development of the site and the emergence of cultural complexity. Our research here and elsewhere shows emphatically that rather than emerging as the first and largest center in Late Archaic times in the lower Mississippi Valley, Poverty Point grew incrementally and its emergence as a major center was at the end of the Late Archaic sequence. The earthworks were constructed only after a prolonged period of occupation that involved little or no mound building. Earthworks and mounds were erected rapidly over a brief span of time and evidence indicate the site was quickly abandoned not long after a major effort was devoted to building Mound A.  We suspect that the people who made up the site’s initial population migrated to the region from several different regions and came together to form a “multiethnic” population. The emergence of the site as a center for trade may have come about as local peoples and those drawn from ancestral homelands came together to create a ritual center.

Work at Poverty Point also draws on and contributes to several other projects run through the Geoarchaeology lab, notably the Geoarchaeology at Jaketown project and the Climate Change and Human History in the Mississippi River Valley project. This work is a collaborative project with Dr. Anthony Ortmann at Murray State University.

Publications

Kidder, Tristram R.

2002 Mapping Poverty Point. American Antiquity 67: 89-101.

2006.  Climate Change and the Archaic to Woodland Transition (3000-2600 cal B.P.) in the Mississippi River Basin. American Antiquity 71:195-231.

2010 Trend, Tradition and Transition at the End of the Archaic. In Trend, Tradition, and Turmoil: What Happened to the Southeastern Archaic? edited by D. H. Thomas and M. Sanger, pp. 23-32. Anthropological Papers. American Museum of Natural History Vol. 89, pt. 2, New York.

2010 Hunter-Gatherer Ritual and Complexity: New Evidence from Poverty Point, Louisiana. In Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Precolumbian North America, edited by S. Alt, pp. 32-51. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake.

2011 Transforming Hunter-Gatherer History at Poverty Point. In Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process, edited by K. E. Sassaman and D. H. Holley, Jr., pp. 95-119. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

2012 Poverty Point. In Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, edited by T. Pauketat, pp. 460-470. Oxford University Press, New York.

Kidder, Tristram R., Anthony Ortmann, and Thurman Allen 2004 Testing Mounds B and E at Poverty Point. Southeastern Archaeology 23:98-113.

Tristram R. Kidder, Anthony L. Ortmann, and Lee J. Arco. 2008 Poverty Point and the Archaeology of Singularity. SAA Archaeological Record 8(5):9-12.

Kidder, Tristram R. and Kenneth Sassaman. 2009 The View from the Southeast. In Archaic Societies: Diversity and Complexity Across the Midcontinent, edited by T. Emerson, D. McElrath, and A. Fortier, pp. 667-694. State University of New York Press, Albany.

Kidder, Tristram R., Lee J. Arco, Anthony L. Ortmann, Timothy M. Schilling, Caroline Boeke, Rachel Bielitz and Katherine A. Adelsberger
2009 Poverty Point Mound A: Final Report of the 2005 and 2006 Field Seasons. Louisiana Division of Archaeology and the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission, Baton Rouge.

Ortmann, Anthony L
2010    Placing the Poverty Point Mounds in their Temporal Context. American Antiquity 75:657–678.

Ortmann, Anthony L., and Tristram R. Kidder
2013  Building Mound A at Poverty Point: Monumental Public Architecture, Ritual Practice, and Implications for Hunter-Gatherer Complexity. Geoarchaeology: An International Journal, in press.

Sherwood, Sarah C. and Tristram R. Kidder
2011 The DaVincis of Dirt: Geoarchaeological Perspectives on Native American Mound Building in the Mississippi River Basin. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 30:69-87. doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2010.11.001.

Presentations

Kidder, Tristram R., and Conard C. Hamilton:
1999 Mapping Poverty Point. Paper presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Pensacola, FL.

Kidder, Tristram R., Anthony Ortmann, and Thurman Allen:
2003 Testing Mounds E and B at Poverty Point: Implications for Understanding Site Structure. Paper presented at the 67th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Denver.

Ortmann, Anthony L., and Tristram R. Kidder:
2005 Recent Excavations at Poverty Point?s Mound A: The ?Tail? of Two Mounds. Paper presented at the 61st annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Columbia.

Kidder, Tristram R.:
2006 Inferring Complexity from Very Rapid Construction of Mound A at Poverty Point, NE Louisiana. Paper presented at the 71st annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Juan.

2006 How Complex Can Hunter-Gatherers Get? Evidence from Poverty Point, NE Louisiana. Invited paper presented at the Center for American Archaeology, Kampsville, IL.

2006 Geoarchaeology of Mound A at Poverty Point. Invited paper presented at the symposium ?Geoarchaeology of Prehistoric Earthworks,? 2006 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Philadelphia.

2006 Landscape, Historical Ecology, and Archaeology at Poverty Point. Invited paper presented at the symposium ?Historical Ecology in the Southeast,? 62nd annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Little Rock.

2007 A New History of Poverty Point. Invited paper presented at the symposium ?Confounding Categories and Conceptualizing Complexities,? 72nd annual meeting of the Society for America Archaeology, Austin.

2008 Is the Whole More than the Sum of the Parts? Late Archaic Hunter-Gatherer Complexity and History at Poverty Point. Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (also at Arizona State University).

2008 Transforming Hunter-Gatherer History at Poverty Point. Invited paper presented at the symposium “Transforming Hunter-Gatherer History,” Amerind Foundation, Dragoon, Arizona.

2010    The Enigma of Poverty Point. Wisconsin Archaeological Society, Milwaukee.

2012    Beyond Hunter–Gatherer Complexity: The Paradoxes of Poverty Point, a Late Archaic site in the Mississippi River Valley. The Parsons Lecture, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Kidder, Tristram R. and Sarah Sherwood:
2012    Geoarchaeological Perspectives on Mound Building and Earthwork Construction in the Life History of Sacred Landscapes. Invited paper presented at the symposium “The Geoarchaeology of Ritual behavior and Sacred Spaces,” 77^th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology Conference, Memphis.

Spivey, S. Margaret and Tristram R. Kidder:
2010   The Origins of Poverty Point. Invited paper presented at the symposium “Current Research on the Poverty Point Culture,” 75^th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis.

Lee J. Arco, S. Margaret Spivey, Tristram R. Kidder and Anthony L. Ortmann:
2011    Places of Pilgrimage? Jaketown and Poverty Point as Ritual–Religious Events. Invited paper presented at the symposium “The Enigma of the Event: Moments of Consequence in the Ancient Southeast,” 68^th annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Jacksonville.