OT - Working at Poverty Point

[Bullethead 12]

I spent this past week crossing off an item that's been on my bucket list since I was about 5 years old: doing real archaeology. I was doing volunteer work at a placed called Poverty Point, an ancient Indian site up in the NE corner of Lousy Anna near the town of Epps. It was a GREAT time; the work was fun and I learned a lot about something I'm very interested in. So, if you're the least bit archaeologically inclined, hit up the archaeologists at some site you fancy and ask if they need help. That's how I got into this.

 

For them as don't know, Poverty Point is a very significant site for a lot of reasons. The most interesting thing about it is that it was the 1st place in the world where it was recognized that hunter-gatherers (or in this case, fisher-gatherers) could find enough food within walking distance of home to settle down, have a population explosion, and build a city with massive public works, monumental architecture, etc., with dedicated artisans cranking out jewelry and such non-essentials. Since Poverty Point broke the agriculture-before-cities paradymn, a few other such sites elsewhere in the world, and considerably older, have been found, but Poverty Point was what opened people's eyes to see them. And regardless, such sites are extremely rare worldwide.

 

Anyway, Poverty Point dates to the Late Archaic period, about 1500 BC. That was long before North America went agricultural. The site is huge; the current park, which doesn't include all of it, is about 425 acres. The site consists of 6 concentric ridges and 5 or 6 mounds, plus outlying suburbs. The ridges have a diameter of 3/4 mile and surround a 37-acre plaza with most of the mounds outside this. The Indians built their hootches atop the ridges and they figure about 2500 of them live in the city itself with about the same number in the Greater Poverty Point area.

 

Here's a map of the park. The ridges themselves are very low these days (the land was plowed for a century or 2 recently) and hardly visible on the ground, but you can see them quite clearly in Google Maps or Google Earth.

 

 

I spent the last week living in the dorm at the top. There's another mound (Motley Mound) outside the park about where the "v" in "Poverty" in the title is. There's also another mound about 2 miles to the south, also on private property, but it's about 1500-2000 years older than Poverty Point.

 

 

This is Mound A (aka "Bird Mound"). When built, this was the largest man-made structure in the Western Hemisphere and is still the 2nd largest Indian mound ever, surpassed only by the much later Monks' Mound at Cahokia. It's about 750' x 640' x 72' and is supposed to have beem about 100' tall originally. According to recent core samples, it was built in about 90 days. And this by hand-carried baskets of dirt: no metal shovels, no draft animals, not even wheelbarrows. And this was AFTER they'd filled in a pre-existing depression under it. This, plus the other mounds, and 7.5 miles of ridges, and all the grading and filling needed to level the area beforehand, adds up to a phenomenal amount of dirt being moved. It really puts things like Silbury Hill in the shade.

 

 

 

The Poverty Point folks had absolutely zero rocks so imported everything. The dart points above were made of rock from the Middle Ohio River Valley, the beads from rock and shell from all over what is now the eastern US. Apparently most of these goods moved by boat along the rivers. The interesting thing is, there's no evidence of Poverty Point exchange goods where the rocks came from. So, either the Poverty Point folks traded in perishable items (hard to imagine what in the days before refrigeration) or they just went and took what they needed. That would have been possible; the could put by far the largest army in the field, as they were by far the largest population center of the time.

 

But anyway, I was out digging stuff up. It was pretty exciting. 1st thing when I got there, they issued me a bullwhip, which came in handy when some Nazis attacked just before lunch, looking for the Lost Ark or whatever . Actually, the only combat was with the clouds of mosquitos. Amazingly, I only saw 1 snake the whole time I was there.

 

What I was really doing was picking through the dirt between the roots of a fallen tree. This tree had been growing atop one of hte ridges so when it fell, it pulled up a big wad of dirt with all sorts of artifacts mixed in. My job was to salvage as much of this stuff as possible, under the direction of 2 staff archaeologists.

 

Here's the tree before and after. The lady in the pics is Fran Hamilton, the Regional Archaeologist for NE LA.

 

 

When we started, the highest point of the dirt was about eye level with me. Being the tallest, I got to dig in the center section. This area turned out to contain an old BBQ pit. The Poverty Point folks had an interesting way of cooking. They made balls of various shapes and sizes out of the dirt, fired them into a type of pottery (called Poverty Point Objects or PPOs), then heated them up and used these hot balls to bake their food in another hole nearby. Thus, by far the most common artifact there is PPO fragments, sometimes intact PPOs. So, my hearth area was crammed full of PPO fragments.

 

We did find some other cool stuff, though. On the left side, apparently somebody had once sat beside the fire chipping flint. Thus, the archaeologist digging there found a lot of chips, fragments of points, and knapping tools.

 

Here are some of the cooler things we found:

 

Across the top are 3 intact biconical PPOs, rather smaller than usual. In the middle is a potsherd, and on the checkerboard card is an actual intact arrowhead. Both the potsherd and the arrowhead are from the Coles Creek Culture of about AD 500. So despite being 1500 years old, they're still young compared to the PPOs, which are about 3500 years old. The Coles Creek items indicate squatters amongst what were already ancient ruins even back then; they had nothing to do with building the place or participating in the Poverty Point Culture.

 

Note the tiny size of the arrowhead, not quite filling a 2cm square. That's typical of true arrowheads. Bigger things are usually either dart points or knives, maybe spearheads. See, the bow and arrow didn't arrive in this part of the world until about AD 500, before which folks used the atlatl and dart. IOW, that point was a new-fangled invention when it was new.

 

Anyway, I had a blast and learned a lot. I highly recommend volunteering to help archaeologists.

 

 

 

 

 

[77Scout 3]

Very cool Bullethead! I learned lots of interesting stuff just now - thanks for posting

[Heck 496]

Very cool information. Thank you for sharing this with us. I wish they'd do a dig at the Saratoga Battlefield, or another in Fort Edward, they're just miles from where I live.

[DonL 0]

Good for you! This is really neat please post more about it. A ppo is sort of like a ceramic bricket that comes with a modern gas grill?

[Bullethead 12]

Very cool information. Thank you for sharing this with us. I wish they'd do a dig at the Saratoga Battlefield, or another in Fort Edward, they're just miles from where I live.

 

What I was doing wasn't any big scheduled excavation, it was just routine maintenance. I'm sure sites near you have similar things going on that they'd love to have help with.

 

Good for you! This is really neat please post more about it. A ppo is sort of like a ceramic bricket that comes with a modern gas grill?

 

PPOs were a bit different in that they were what actually cooked the food. You dug 2 holes, 1 for the fire and 1 for the cooking. First you heated up the PPOs in the fire, then put them in the cooking hole, laid the food on top, and covered it over. Thus, the food baked from the heat of the PPOs without any flame exposure or smokiness. Sounds kinda bland to me--I love flame-seared BBQ and smoky taste--but that's how they did it. I suppose, however, they could have made any type of sauce they wanted to make up for the lack of BBQ taste. All the sauce ingredients you can imagine grow wild in abundance all around this part of the world.

 

PPOs have that name because they're insanely ubiquitous at Poverty Point Culture sites but not found at contemporary sites of other cultures. Other folks used clay balls or more conventional BBQ methods without balls. PPOs aren't clay, they're dirt. The ancestors of the Poverty Point folks had used clay but they switched to dirt and modern replication experiments have shown that worked better. The dirt in most of Lousy Anna is a combination of sandy loess and clayey silt, which is why it can be fired into a nice, hard, orange mass.

 

PPOs come in many shapes and sizes, and aren't spherical. The biconical type pictured above is one of the most common, but they also made football- (or, officially, melon-) shaped ones, and often grooved them with their fingers. And those are just the more simple shapes--they came in lots of other really strange shapes. Making PPOs seems to have been a common chore for children because many of the finger grooves are so tiny. Sometimes, you can see the fingerprints of whoever made them preserved in the surface. Also, a fair number of PPOs received decorations like carved grooves, impressed dimples, etc. Seems a waste of time, given how expendable PPOs were (see below). Some modern experiments seem to indicate that the different shapes stored heat longer and/or released it at different rates, which is used to justify the variety of shapes, each used for a different recipe. This idea isn't universally accepted, however. Personally, I'd expect the real difference to be in terms of surface area to mass, regardless of shape.

 

Modern replication experiments have shown a PPO has a short lifespan, say 5 or 6 meals or just 2 or 3 days at most, after which it becomes really crumbly and falls apart. This is assuming parts of it hadn't already spalled off from differential heating and cooling. This is why there are literally tons of PPO fragments at Poverty Point Culture sites. Seriously, you can't stick a shovel in the ground without turning up a handful of them. This is why they're so diagnostic of Poverty Point Culture sites.

 

The museum has a display of some of the decorated PPOs. Here's an example of a selection:

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

Who ever said Americans have a very short History !?

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Nice post BH...on a fascinating subject! (they'll have had Dogs too no doubt)....sorry..had to get that one in!

[Olham 164]

Only recently they had this excavations on German TV - I had no idea, that there had been such older cultures.

Thanks for the good overview here, Bullet!

[Bullethead 12]

Nice post BH...on a fascinating subject! (they'll have had Dogs too no doubt)....sorry..had to get that one in!

 

I'm sure they had dogs. The 1st Indians seem to have brought dogs with them when they came over, whenever that was (there's considerable debate on that). Indian dogs probably looked a lot like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Dog

 

Only recently they had this excavations on German TV - I had no idea, that there had been such older cultures!

 

You've actually heard of Poverty Point before? I'm amazed. Most folks over here haven't. Or if they have, they just lump it in with all the thousands of other Indian mound sites around the eastern half of the US, not realizing how much older it is than most of the others.

 

But Indians had started building mounds in Lousy Anna about 2000 years before Poverty Point, about 5500 years ago in the Middle Archaic. It's only been in the last decade or 2 that folks have learned how old some of these mounds are. Unlike Poverty Point, however, these mounds don't seem to have marked permanent villages. They also seem to have been built up in many stages over decades or even centuries. Current thinking is that they represent places where roaming bands of hunter-gatherers periodically gathered for whatever purpose(s), sometimes adding new layers of dirt to the piles.

 

It's all still very mysterious. For instance, between these Middle Archaic mounds and Poverty Point, it's like the constructin industry crashed for about 1500-2000 years. And after Poverty Point, there's another gap in mound-building for about 500-1000 years. Is this really what happened, or have we not just found the mounds that fill these gaps?

[Olham 164]

You've actually heard of Poverty Point before? I'm amazed. Most folks over here haven't. at fill these gaps?

We have some quite good TV channels. I only remembered it, cause you described that it was a "not-yet-agricultural" society who built them.

And that had made me listen and look, back then, when it was on TV.

 

By the way, you can recognise it very well in GoogleMaps.

[Bullethead 12]

By the way, you can recognise it very well in GoogleMaps.

 

Those pics are a few years old at least. Since they were taken, they've cut the trees off the mounds so should be able to see them from space now, instead of just clumps of trees. However, the concentric ridges show up quite well.

[rjw 48]

I spent this past week crossing off an item that's been on my bucket list since I was about 5 years old: doing real archaeology. I was doing volunteer work at a placed called Poverty Point, an ancient Indian site up in the NE corner of Lousy Anna near the town of Epps.

 

Thanks for the insight! Great detail provided in your post!! I for one appreciate it.

 

I have always taken interest in the southwest anasazi cuture, although one other interest is much closer to where you just worked.

"The mound builders" who's culture spanned from 3400BC to the 16th century. Rather than try to elucidate here I would refer to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_(people) for a summary. I find that culture very intriguing partly because very little is really known about it in comparison to other indiginous people of North America.

[Bullethead 12]

I have always taken interest in the southwest anasazi cuture

 

I'm also quite interested in the Anasazi. What intrigue me most is what sort of large-scale organization was going on in Chaco times, and also the extremely traumatic period that followed its collapse. I recommend Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest by Steven LeBlanc. http://www.amazon.com/Prehistoric-Warfare-American-Southwest-LeBlanc/dp/0874805813

 

"The mound builders" who's culture spanned from 3400BC to the 16th century. Rather than try to elucidate here I would refer to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia....builder_(people) for a summary. I find that culture very intriguing partly because very little is really known about it in comparison to other indiginous people of North America.

 

Thing is, there wasn't 1 mound-building culture, there were a bunch of them, often with wide gaps between them both in time and in space. Also, different cultures built mounds of many different designs and used them for different purposes. Eventually, the idea went mainstream so that by a few centuries before Contact, pretty much everybody east of the Mississippi was doing similar things simultaneously.

 

But even then, it wasn't a monolithic cultural block as originally supposed. These days, the so-called Mississippian Culture as seen as being broken up into a bunch of regional variants only generally similar to each other and with lots of important differences in detail. This has reached the point now that academia rarely use "Mississippian" anymore but use only the regional cultural names. For example, the erstwhile "Plaquemine Mississippian Culture" is now just the "Plaquemine Culture".

 

IOW, these days saying "Mississippian Culture" today is a lot like saying "Renaissance Europe". Both terms set general geographical and temporal boundaries to the subject under discussion, which in turn bring to mind general expectations of the type of societies that existed within these boundaries, and what they were doing in general. But to get into the details of either large-scale culture, you have to use terms like "Caddoan" and "Plaquemine" just as you would "French" and "Italian".

[Herr Prop-Wasche 7]

There are several examples of mound cultures in my neck of the woods as well. The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, near Zanesville, as well as the Hopewell Inidians in SW Ohio. As a matter of fact, I spent one summer at a dig near my hometown of Dayton at a Hopewell Indian site, circa 1,000 A.D. But, I was a snot-nosed kid back then and couldn't really appreciate what I was doing.

[Bullethead 12]

I spent one summer at a dig near my hometown of Dayton at a Hopewell Indian site, circa 1,000 A.D. But, I was a snot-nosed kid back then and couldn't really appreciate what I was doing.

 

I hope you at least took some pics :). Sounds like a great summer vacation. How'd you get the opportunity?

 

We had a branch of the vast Hopewell family down thisaway, the Marksville Culture. I think they're responsible for at least some of the mounds in my neighborhood, although the later Troyville and Coles Creek folks were here as well.

[Herr Prop-Wasche 7]

It was part of a summer program offered through the Dayton Natural History museum that my Mom signed me up for when I was a teenager--therefore, the snot-nosed part!