American History Hit - Louisiana's Ancient Mystery: Poverty Point

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

There are no other historic sites like this one on the planet. The concentric semi circles and mounds of Poverty Point in Louisiana are a mystery not only to those who come across them, but also to the archaeologists.Don is joined by Tristram Kidder to find out what we do know about this late archaic site and the people who built it.Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In northeastern Louisiana, at a site located near the upper right-hand corner of the state, is an arrangement of prehistoric earthen structures created by humans nearly 3,000 years ago.

The site is comprised of six long mounds, intricately aligned in concentric arcs. The design is strange, haunting even, clearly constructed with some greater purpose. But what boggles the mind is the sheer work required to make them. These mounds and others elsewhere on the premises would have required hauling loads of heavy soil and rock. Of course, trucks had no part of this. This was pure human labor, as with the pyramids of Giza, the Mayan temples, Stonehenge. But this is Poverty Point, right here in Louisiana, and it raises all the same mysterious questions as those other human endeavors. the how, the who, the why any human society would go to such great lengths to build anything of such scope and ambition.

What was the reason? Hello, everybody. It's Don Wildman, and welcome to another episode of American History Hit. In northeastern Louisiana, near what is today, West Carroll Parish, is evidence of a Native American settlement dating to a period thousands of years ago. The expansive and specific nature of the place. It's intricate layout. its remarkable design, demonstrates it was created by an organized and developing society, one relying on systems of nuance and structure, a people living in a sophisticated fashion that challenges typical assumptions of pre-Columbian American civilization.

This is a place created by hunter-gatherers, let's be clear. But these were hunter-gatherers who built things, and built them fast and built them big with considered intention. It's called Poverty Point, and it is a world heritage site. Not enough Americans know about. Count me among them until this week. And with us today, we have an authority on the subject. Tristram Kitter is an archaeologist from Washington University,

who has worked at Poverty Point for decades. He is one of a dynastic line of archaeologists right back to his grandfather. His research is focused on the evolution of human societies and the effects of climate change on those ancestral communities. Welcome, Tristram. Nice to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much, Don't.

Poverty Point. I'm really astonished. As I mentioned, I was totally unaware of the place until this interview came up on the calendar. I feel shame. How have I missed this story and how many dozens of other places like it should I own up to? Well, you're not alone in missing it. I think that there are several things about it. One is for complicated reasons having to do with local geology, the people who built Poverty Point didn't use stone. So unlike some American sites like Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon in the southwest, it seems impressive because people, I think, have this idea that piling up dirt to make mounds is an easy task. But one of the things that I would argue is that the labor and the effort at a site like Poverty Point is really extraordinary. Just to give you an example of the scale of this, everybody knows about Stonehenge, but we could fit six stonehenges in the footprint of just the largest earth and mound at Poverty Point. That's pretty extraordinary. Yeah. That's the overall idea of this conversation, I think. We are typically taught from an early age in this country that

pre-Columbian American societies weren't even societies. They were hunter-gatherers focused simply on their survival, searching for food and shelter, hunting, fishing, and moving about nomatically. And this was certainly a big part of life back then, but sites like Poverty Point proved that there was much more going on, that there was a developed community as well. So let's get the basics first. What time period are we talking about? And when did people exist at this site? So the chronology for the site is basically about, let's call it, 1550 to 1230 BC. And we know it as the late archaic period. And it's a time period, as you say, when some populations were moving about. But there was a remarkable level of sophistication amongst these people. So for instance, across Eastern North America, people were in conversation with one another. And we can tell that by the object. that are exchanged, the materials that people passed from one society or one community to another. So we're talking about 3,000-ish years ago.

A little more, yeah. Wow. This is pre-agriculture. This really is hunter-gatherer, but we're really addressing a significant difference in the understanding of hunter-gatherer societies here. We should address the name Poverty Point. Why is it called that? And when did archaeological studies start there?

So no one knows exactly why it's called Poverty Point. We think it's because in the Civil War era in the United States, this was a contested zone during the Battle of Vicksburg. And it's likely that this area was stripped of supplies, food, you know, all of the trappings that people had built up. And as a result, it was impoverished. And there are a series of steamboat landings along this bayou called Bayou Mason that have names like Hard Times Landing and Poverty Point. So it's probably a consequence simply another era of American history. Let's illustrate what this places we're talking about. The layout and topography of Poverty Point.

It indicates the existence of a mounded earth designed in concentric circles built over, as you say, a 400-acre expanse. I mean, this is a large site, which really you can't see until you're up above it from a bird's eye view. And from there, you see that these are arcs of these mounds surrounded by six large, singular mounds of varying dimensions. Am I getting this right? Yeah. So if the listener wants to hold his left or her left hand up and form a C with your left hand, that's the shape of these arqueurate ridges. And at the outside of that C shape is the largest mound, which is mound A, which is about 72 feet tall. It's about 700 feet long and about 700 feet wide, but it's shaped more like a T, so it's not a square. that alone, just to give you, again, some scale, it's about 235,000 cubic meters of soil,

which is we estimate somewhere around 32,500 dump truck loads of sediment. Oh, my lord. That's amazing. Yeah, and the entire site is estimated. And again, I understand that these are estimates of about a million cubic meters of soil. And again, I always convert it to a dump truck load because it's something my brain can get around. that's about 142,000 dump truckloads of dirt. And what's important to sort of put this into perspective is all of this soil is being moved by hand.

So we don't have domestic animals. We don't even have wheelbarrows. We don't have metal tools. These people, as you say, didn't have agriculture, but they did have a very abundant environment with deer, fish, small mammals, lots of nuts, plants. It certainly wasn't an environment of scarcity, or at least as best we can tell. The earth and mound designs, there's several sites like this in North America. Most significantly is Cahokia, which has a huge mound.

That's over 100 feet tall today. But that comes a thousand years after this, or more, right? It's more, exactly. It's almost 2,000 years after. Poverty Point is the second largest site north of the Rio Grande, probably north of the Valley of Mexico. and it's all built by hand by these people we call hunter-gatherers. And as you said at the outset, this certainly suggests that these aren't the sort of textbook hunter-gatherers who are living in small groups moving about on a regular basis. Another thing that I think is important to understand about Poverty Point, it's in an area of the Mississippi Valley.

As you said, it's in northeastern Louisiana. There's no naturally occurring stone in the area around the site because it's just the alluvial valley. yet the site has literally tons and tons of stone. We estimate, and again, call it a guesstimate, something like 80 to 90 metric tons of stone were imported to Poverty Point. And some of the stone is coming from very long distances. As an example, for instance, we have stone coming from Tennessee, We have stone coming from Kentucky, from Arkansas. We have stone coming from Missouri. We have stone coming from Alabama.

We have something called steatite, and people may know this as soapstone. They were using this to make large stone vessels, and they were importing these by the hundreds, and these are very heavy vessels. So there's a single feature at the site that they excavated in the 1940s that has, I believe it's over 200 of these stone vessels, weighing well in excess of something like 4,000 pounds. So they're building these earthworks,

but they're also moving vast amounts of lithic material and presumably things that we can't recover in the archaeological record. The later version of this I spoke of as Cahokia, it exists as a permanent settlement because of the agricultural advances that have been made. The community is there with massive amounts of farmland. This is not true of poverty point. It does not serve that function.

What then are the functions of these mounds and in general the site itself? That's the fun thing. So you're right. Cahokia, as an example, is what appears to be a large permanent settlement. And there are many contemporary pre-contact sites like Cahokia, let's say, from 1,000 AD to European contact. Poverty Point has multiple stories. One of the stories that is sort of the popular one is that it's a great big town. It's a place where people came together for a long period of time, let's say five or six hundred years,

and they imported all of this stone material into an area where there was little stone, and it became a very important economic center. So it was a place where they were making tools and exporting them, bringing stuff in, making them and exporting them outward. So think of it as a big economic center that also has lots of people living there. The mounds are in this. this story thought of as sort of ritual monuments that sort of people were making to worship their gods. And that's not, I think, an incorrect version of this, which is that the mounds are probably part of some kind of ritual action or performance. We think, though, that the mounds, based on recent archaeological excavations, were built very quickly in a matter of years, maybe 10 years, something like that.

and that it's not a center, sort of an economic, domestic center for the most part, but rather a place where people came together because they were responding to climate change. Oh, interesting. And in this sense, it's much more like a pilgrimage center, something somewhat akin to, but not the same as Mecca or Lords or the Hill of Tepeyak, where Our Lady of Guadalupe is venerated. Yeah, it brings to mind, Gebeckli Tepe out in eastern Turkey, you know. You have this extraordinary sophistication and even art forms are there at a time when people

were thought to be just making flints. And Gobeckley is a good example. There are a number of these sites around the world where people, for reasons that we only can kind of guess at, came together to worship, frankly, their God or gods. And in response to the circumstances of the time. So one of the things that we know is sometime call it about 1,300 B.C. to 1250 BC. We know that Eastern North America is undergoing a fairly significant amount of climate change.

Rivers are shifting courses. Seeds are changing. The shape of the coastline is changing. Food sources are coming or going depending on exactly where you are. Winters could be worse or better depending on where you are. And we think that Native peoples in Eastern North America recognize this. They saw this. And we know that Native people in their philosophy, their religious beliefs, they're stewards, they're caretakers of their physical world.

And they have a moral responsibility in a very interconnected relational world to respond. And we think that Poverty Point may in fact be that response. People came there. They practiced their rituals. They built mounds as part of this practice. and in doing so they were trying to write an unsteady world. And in that sense, it's a different story than it's just an economic town. I'll be right back after this short break.

Meantime, if you'd like this to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at a H.H at historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. Join me, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey through stages of existence towards liberation.

Look back in time to understand technologies of the future. One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard AI in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected. Origins. Who or what invented sex? Yeah, fish. Fish for the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to patented on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. The concentric circles that we speak of, it really has the look of an amphitheater. Is that at all possible or is that just a coincidence?

You know, this is one of the tough things. So in this area, the site is built on a terrace about 15, 20 feet above the floodplain. It's never been flooded. So these are not being built for people to necessarily get their feet dry. But at the same time, the assumption has always been these concentric ridges, which would have stood, let's say, six feet, seven feet above the sort of lay of the land. We've always assumed that these are places where people would have lived. there's lots and lots of garbage on their surface. But the funny thing is, nearly 60, 70 years of research, including recent geophysical research, which allows us to look beneath the soil to see whether there are houses. We have never found a single house at the site. The geophysical prospecting is exciting because what they found are these very large circular things. And I call them things because they're too big to be domestic structures, houses. they're built with poles that are roughly the size of a telephone pole, and some of them are really large.

There's one that's about to do the mathematical conversion, about 180, almost 190 feet across. Wow. So what are these? There's not center posts, so it's not a house. It's not something that was roofed. There's no evidence that it was a solar observatory. The poles could align with stars, but there's so many of them take your pick at what they are. So something interesting is going on.

As for an amphitheater, quite honestly, Don, one of the problems is the scale. So it's 3,000 plus feet from the outside of the outer ridge to the outside of the next outer ridge. That's up. If it's an amphitheater, it's a great big amphitheater. Well, they had very big voices. They were able to project back then, I guess. It really is the scale of the place. How long did this construction take?

You mentioned 10 years, but the creation of, say, Mound A, which you... you mentioned is 32,000 dump trucks worth of dirt. How long did it take for them to build that? Well, we don't know exactly. So what we did is we did an excavation in the edge of the mound, and we went from the top of the mound to the bottom of the mound or that section of the mound. And what we were looking to do was to see what evidence there was of stages of construction. So if it had taken a long time as an exam, over, let's say, a couple hundred years,

we'd expect there to be multiple layers, like a layer kick, the classic sort of stratigraphy in archaeology. We'd also expect if it took a long time that we would see evidence of weathering. And by that, I mean, for instance, evidence of rainfall, erosion, because this is a dirt mound, and so we would expect it to erode. This is an area that is not quite subtropical, but anyone who's been to northeast Louisiana knows it's a hot, humid environment. We'd expect trees to grow on it, grass to grow on it. And we can see those things, and we literally apply techniques to get down to the micron scale. And we can see no evidence of stages or any kind of weathering.

So that implies, or we infer from that, that this was built quickly. And we guess. And again, I would argue it's an educated guess, but still a guess, that it could be as little as 30 days to build that mound. And probably no more than 90 days. No kidding. Yeah. That is a huge fact. It's extraordinary. And it took me five years to have the courage to sort of say that publicly. Really?

And the reason we think that in part is northeast Louisiana gets a lot of rainfall. And we have good climate records going back almost 150 years. And there's never been a period of time longer than roughly 30 days when there's been no significant rainfall. And again, these are dirt mounds. So they would erode. If it rained hard on them, we would would see evidence of that. And how does that correspond to the other? I mean, was all this built that quickly? Well, since we did that work, we've started in 2005, we've now looked at some of the ridges

and another mound called Mount C, which is inside the ridges, and they all look like they were built incredibly quickly. Again, we see no evidence of erosion. We don't see bugs colonizing these earthworms digging in them, trees growing on them. And again, we can see this literally at the micro-referrales. on scale. So we're at the microscopic scale where you can theoretically, at least see literally a raindrop, and we could see an earthworm if there'd been time for an earthworm to dig into one of these exposed surfaces. We see nothing like that. I mean, I even have a hard time imagine.

Holy cow, this is a lot of Earth being moved very quickly, but it all seems to add up. You'd need that much labor, which is a lot of people, to build something that large. I mean, the math works out that there's a great concentration. There's a big population here. So something is happening that is bringing all these people together, whether they do this every year or more frequently than that, who knows? But the essence of the idea is just a vast concentration or you couldn't possibly pull that off. One of the things I would say is indeed, this suggests a very large concentration of people coming together, but it need not necessarily be for very long periods of time. And one thing is, these are hunter-gatherers. So the theory, at least, is that there would have been a

relatively low population density. So this suggests that we're bringing people together over a large area. Exactly. And remember all of that stone that I'm telling you that's coming from very long distances, that may be, in fact, the evidence of people coming to the site from long distances, bringing with them offerings and materials maybe to trade or exchange, but we don't think that's the primary reason. It was a Grateful Dead concert, wasn't it? It's Burning Man, actually. I see.

If anyone wants to do this, Google a picture of Burning Man and then Google a picture of Poverty Point. Tom, they look the same. Oh, interesting. And Burning Man is the same thing. People come together. They have these ritual event, and then they go away. Were these the predecessors of the Mrs.

I mean, is this the beginning of that or part of that or not? I think the answer is yes and no. I mean, as you said so, if Mississippi is sort of identified with, say, the Cahokia site, this large site near St. Louis, clearly they are in some way the biological ancestors in a generic sense. There's obviously some distance involved. There's a lot of change between the end of this archaic period at, say, a site like Poverty Point and what happens at Cahokia.

And in fact, one thing that's really interesting to me is that the end of poverty points, so the poverty point site is over by, let's call it, 1250 to 1,200 BC, there is then a period across much of eastern North America when we see very little evidence of archaeological activity. I mean, people are clearly there. They're not living in the big river valleys. And one of the things that's interesting is that they're not building mounds. They're doing things that look very different, very local. So Poverty Point is this cosmopolitan expression for the next five, six, seven hundred years.

It's very local. And then we'll get another surge of this cosmopolitanism with what's known as the Hopewell culture, which is best known from Southern Ohio. Your specialty, as I mentioned at the opening is the effects of climate change on these ancestral communities. This has that feeling. I agree with you. It seems like there was a crisis at hand.

And whether this was a religion per se, it was a reaction to that crisis. Am I in the right direction? I think so. So the native peoples have a philosophy, at least today, we refer to as a sort of revelatory landscape idea. And this is simply that for native peoples, the landscape is a place of revelation. It's where you commune with the gods. It's where this interaction with all of the various relationships.

entities. So in native philosophy, humans, deer, rivers, mountains, trees, they're all related in some way. And the communication happens in particular places. So we think that Poverty Point may in fact be one of these revelatory landscapes, a place where people felt that they had to come in order to, as I said earlier, write the unsettled world that was being affected by climate. change. It reminds me of a place I did on television one time. Down in Peru, there is the Chimo civilization. And there was a finding there that was extraordinary, where they found so many children who were sacrificed. This isn't very long ago. 72, I think, were there. And it's such an appalling idea. And the theory was that, indeed, in response to a massive climate problem, they were forced to do something extraordinary. And in this case, sacrifices on that level to their most precious anyone's most precious possession of their children. And these children, Children were brought from all over the region as part of a major right of sacrifice.

But the additional level of this is that there was a political aspect of it, that the elite who were in charge of this crisis had to be seen by the people as trying to do something in response to this massive climate problem. Whether they believe this would work or not, it was part of their ruling mandate to do something in reaction. The difference here is that we're early days as far as political organization, right? Yeah, so we have no obvious evidence that there were people we would call the elites. Now, it takes somebody to organize people to build a site like Poverty Point. I make a joke that you can't organize a church picnic without somebody being a leader. What we think the biggest difference is between, say, the Chimu or other societies like this, is that the leadership was what we might call transient.

It would be situational when you need a leader. a leader emerges, often he or she might be the best at that particular job. But the rest of the time, he or she is just another, you know, John Q public in the day-to-day living. And as a consequence, we think that we've got a very different kind of situation than, say, you're describing with a Chimu, this is much more we sense a collective response, where again, people are connected to one another. They're connected to all things. And as a result, humans have this moral responsibility to do something. When the world starts going awry, you've got to have some response. And I don't think that that's actually unusual. We have the same sorts of things today. They just take on, as you say, sort of more politically freighted kinds of trappings. But I don't think it's unrealistic to say that, you know, these people saw their world changing. And they weren't going to sit around and, wait to evolve or, you know, stand there like turkeys with their mouths open, waiting for the rain to fall on them. They've responded. And they responded in the way that worked in their

philosophy. You're teaching your archaeology. Several others I've met over the years, speak to this sort of myth that the undergatherer societies were as simple as they were. Where did that myth really get born? Well, it comes out of multiple places. The long-term history are people like Rousseau and others who are sort of articulating this idea of simplicity and in contrast with the then complexity of the 17th century world. More recently, it comes post-World War II from ethnographic studies, particularly of African hunter-gatherers. So on a global basis, hunter-gatherers are effectively reduced to a very small number of societies, anthropologists can look at, Africa being one place where they could do it. And they did these wonderful and amazing studies of groups. One of the

most famous or the group called the Kung, who were small, a small scale. They were living in groups of 20 to 40 people. They migrated a whole lot. They had no political organization of any note. There is a famous anthropological analysis which talked about the fact that they had what they needed and they didn't need anything else. So they rejected that kind of need to accumulate. And that became a very popular trope, which I think is a response to the modern world, right? We're all busy, busy. We work, we work. We accumulate. And there were these people who were like not doing that. They work five hours a day or three hours a day or something like that. And as a result, it was much simpler for them. And I think that we want that to be the case.

It's also a convenient way to glorify your own effect on these people. It's going to civilize, you and Christianize you, by the way, on the way. But it's the civilization that we bring to you that will improve your Latin life. They were on their way to that anyway. You know, the word civilization is such a weighted term because it means so many different things to so many different people. These were populations who were, as best we can tell, from a very limited data set, perfectly healthy. They were not fighting with one another. There's no evidence of that kind of stuff. they had a sophisticated economy. They seem to have cooperated very well.

If that civilization or a hallmark of civilization, then they were pretty darn civilized. You know, they weren't at each other's throat all the time. They weren't competing and trying to dominate and things like that. There's a fact we did this show about Cahokia. And there was a fact that I forgot to bring up on that show, which is so revealing, that that place was a larger density, population density, then London at the time. It's a fascinating fact of life that societies were being built already

and well on their way to becoming something unique in the world. Tristam, thank you so much for the story. I invite everyone to look up Poverty Point. It is a place to visit that is a world heritage site. I imagine a great part of the world to hang out and learn that this continent of ours dates way back in terms of humanity

and the way humans organize themselves. Thanks to the good work of this good man. Thank you very much, Tristam. My pleasure. Thanks, Dawn. and I appreciate it. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.