The Ancients - Poverty Point: Centre of Ancient America

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

An ancient, colossal site in Northeastern Louisiana, Poverty Point is a mystery amongst archaeologist and anthropologists a like. Dating back nearly 4 millennia, Poverty Point is renowned for it's massive earthworks, with gigantic concentric circles, complex mounds, and towering ridges - it's a site to behold. But who exactly built Poverty Point, and more importantly - why?In this episode Tristan welcomes Poverty Point's Park Manager, Mark Brink, to the podcast to help decipher some of the mystery surrounding this Prehistoric site. Looking at the incredible earthworks, examining the recent archaeology, and delving in Prehistoric American society - what do we actually know about Poverty Point?If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're going back to prehistoric North America. We're going to Louisiana, to the Mississippi River and a site that is some 3,500 years old. It's called Poverty Point and truly it is one of the jewels of ancient America. Its plaza, its several urban ridges, its great monumental prehistoric mounds that were created several thousand years ago. It seems to be in this important centre of prehistoric mounds that were created several thousand years ago. It seems to have been

this important centre of prehistoric America with people venturing here from very far away. Now that being said, there is still so much about Poverty Point that remains shrouded in mystery. And so to learn more about this site, I was delighted to interview the Poverty Point Park manager, Mark Brink, a couple of weeks back. Mark, he works at this site almost every day, all year. And it was fascinating because he is on a mission to share the incredible story of Poverty Point with as many people as possible. It was wonderful to interview him and I really do hope you enjoy today's episode. So without further ado, here's Mark. Mark, it is great to have you on the podcast today.

Thanks a bunch, Tristan, for having me. You're more than welcome, especially as we're doing another ancient America topic today, Poverty Point. Let's get straight into it. Where in the US are we talking with Poverty Point? Poverty Point is an ancient site in the lower Mississippi Valley, in present day northeast Louisiana. And it's a very rural place. There's lots of agricultural fields, corn, soybeans, there's lots of agricultural fields corn soybeans some cotton and even some rice and some pockets but being rural is one way that we find ancient sites because it's protected or at least more protected from you know development and the the rise of urbanization and you mentioned prehistoric sites, but what exactly is Poverty Points? What should we be envisaging? Okay, so this site was the largest community of Native folks in North America, or at least the US and Canada, roughly 34 to 3500 years ago. 3,500 years ago. And not only was there some sort of year-round community, the native folks created the largest mounds and earthworks for their time. They had a sophisticated long-distance exchange

network. And they did all of this as a hunter-fisher-gatherer culture. So that's it in a nutshell. So with a hunter-gatherer society, normally we think of these kind of societies, if they're not farming, as always being moving from place to place. But with Poverty Point, from what you're saying, can it almost kind of blow that idea out the water, the fact that they are congregating, that they are creating this great center almost at this place in Louisiana. You got it. The one thing I would note is that we should have known this already. And the archaeology of Poverty Point has shown that hunters, fishers, and gatherers have been

capable of monumental earthworks, of course, thousands of years in the past. But when Europeans first arrived to the Americas, they found hunting, fishing, and gathering communities. And they were large scale, sometimes with massive public works projects, such as the Calusa that De Soto encountered in Florida, or all of your native tribes and peoples along the West Coast, none of those people ever farmed, and yet they lived in year-round communities with sophisticated social structures and really rich cultures. So Poverty Point just proves that not only were hunters and gatherers doing it thousands of years ago, we're all capable of doing this, even with this sort of lifestyle. And how big an area does Poverty Points cover?

The site itself that we have under management today is 470 acres. Wow. But there's a ceremonial core of about 360 acres or so. It's absolutely massive. And as you say, this is 3,500 years old. It's absolutely astonishing. I must also ask, before we really delve into its various features, the archaeology, why is it called Poverty Point of All Names? Well, there is a historic place name. So lots of sites like the Hopewell Culture, for instance, take the historic place names that the settlers named the land as they were moving into the space.

So by the 1830s or 40s, there was a plantation on site that covered 1,900 acres, and it was named Poverty Point. And we don't know if that place name was in existence already due to a point in the Bayou Mason on which the site sits, or if the landowner created that name and named that point in the Bayou Mason on which the site sits, or if the landowner created that name and named that point in the bayou himself. Right. Okay. So that's the historic basis for the name, and that is now endured as the name of this site. In regards to the layout of Poverty Point there, all of these earthworks, I'm presuming that not all of these earthworks are the same in how they look. What are these various styles of prehistoric earthworks that you have at Poverty

Point? Exactly right. And the cool thing about Poverty Point is that if you're looking at the assemblage of mounds and earthworks, and you look at it from above, it is unique. There is no other site in the world that resembles Poverty Point. There is a 43-acre central plaza in the very middle of the site, and it was constructed earthwork. On average, we find that the ancient people filled in this space with about a meter of soil. Outside of that plaza are six semi-elliptical ridges that were constructed between four and six or seven feet high. And if you stretch them out end to end, six and a half miles long. The outer diameter of these ridges is three quarters of a mile or almost exactly one kilometer. And there's other, the big stuff, right, the mounds themselves.

Mound A being the largest, covering several acres of space, 72 feet high, 390,000 tons of dirt, and a number of smaller mounds, including Mound E, Mound B, Mound C, and Mound F. There's also another mound on the site, which is Mound D, constructed by a later culture about 1800 years after the Poverty Point culture had vanished by 1100 BCE. So that's interesting in itself. So the site of Poverty Point, if you see evidence of it being reused by a different people living there much, much later, do you think this also potentially

emphasises the importance of this site in prehistory, in the fact that people did return to this area? They would have seen what would have been ancient sites to them. And they once again make this an important part of their culture, of their world. Well, there's a few different ways we could look at this, because 1800 years of abandonment is a hell of a long time. And that is really strange that you would not have continual use of the site even after it was abandoned by 1100 BCE. Because there's a lot of different cultures in that 1800 year span in this region. And we don't see a lot of evidence of them, you know, using the site. Certainly not for, you know, living means or village life.

If the site continued to be important in prehistory after 1100 BCE, it may have been for ceremonial use only. And if you're using a site for these very intermittent religious purposes without spending the night, you're not going to find a lot of artifacts. So if it remained to be super important, even through all of American prehistory, we certainly don't have a physical record of it. I love nevertheless the different archaeological structures that you seem to have from this site. Some 3,500 years ago, this main phase of occupation before it is abandoned.

You mentioned earlier the plaza. So let's almost work our way out and focus in detail on these various different archaeological features that you have. So explain to us, Mark, what this plaza is. The plaza is a constructed surface. So, and here's the crazy bit. As we do more and more archaeology, the more we find how dynamic the site is. more and more archaeology, the more we find how dynamic the site is. And over 95% of soil cores and excavations, we find that underneath the surface of the plaza, the ancient people borrowed dirt. So they stripped away the natural surface of this space. And within this strip space, we find evidence of at least 35 or so post circles or timber circles.

Sometime later in the period, they said, hey, wait, guys, let's fill it back in. And on average, there's about a meter of artificial film. In some cases, it's real deep. In some cases, it's quite shallow. But on average, that's a hell of a lot of dirt, over 43 acres. And during its time of use, over 500 or 600 years, it was likely used as a communal gathering space. We don't find evidence of habitation. We don't find a lot of artifacts in the plaza.

Although we do find these post circles or timber features, and we see that it was constructed. So we assume it must have been massively important for the people to put in all that work and labor. That is so interesting, especially when you have, let's say over here in the UK and Britain and in the islands, especially places like Orkney, you have stone circles and you look at their purpose as potentially being ceremonial or certainly having a communal purpose. And then looking at these wood circles that you have right at the centre of Poverty Point, that potentially could have had a similar focus.

Maybe so. What do those stone circles at Orkney tell us about the ancient people there? Do we have any clues? Well, exactly. It's kind of hinted at potentially it potentially its communal purpose, or actually maybe the whole purpose of building the stone circle was maybe more important than its actual final purpose. But I guess we are kind of going on a tangent there. I think that was a great thing to add, because that is one thing we can say archaeologically about Poverty Point, is that the process of construction of all these

things is a great way to tie your community and build those social networks that were essential to life back then and even are today. So if you don't know the true purpose because it's so far back in prehistory, these are the things we can say in confidence. Well then, going a bit further on that then, Mark, with this central plaza and having these earthen ridges almost surrounding it, but not completely surrounding it, how important is the river that flows down this site? Do you think this river, almost as an ancient motorway perhaps, was for these prehistoric people? That's entirely it. Today, there's the Bayou Mason on the eastern edge of the site. And bayou is just a word from the Choctaw language.

It's basically the same thing as a very small river. There's got to be some flow for it to be a bayou. And at the time, this waterway was the lifeblood for the site, bringing in all the exotic materials from hundreds, if not over a thousand miles away, bring in people, bring in ideas, bring in food from the floodplain that borders the site on that eastern edge where the bayou flows. And at the time of occupation, there's a few thoughts here from excavations at the edge of the site on that eastern side. We do know that there was water there at the time, of course, but the water levels may have been much higher than today. And there may have been a lake there instead of flowing water like the Bayou Mason. mason, but certainly a life-giving resource and connecting this site to the far reaches of the rest of the American Southeast and the Mississippi Valley. So from the archaeology that has survived from within this plaza, do we have much material evidence for long or far-reaching connections? So the evidence for far-reaching connections doesn't truly come from the plaza. It comes from the ridges themselves. Right. come from in and around the ridges themselves. And that simply tells us that this was the occupation space.

This is where the people lived their everyday lives. So the ridges are really complicated, and we're only just beginning to really dive into the sequence of their construction. And there's some ongoing archeology on this topic today. What is clear is that even before the ridges were constructed, that people lived on the site. So we can find, you know, village and occupational debris underneath the ridges. In some cases, we find that they're building a small part of a ridge and living on

a section, and then building it higher and living on that section. And then after construction, they likely lived at the very tops of these ridges and wattle and daub huts. The problem is we don't have any complete house floors from the tops of these ridges because for over 150 years, they were plowed under as part of agriculture when the site was used for farmland. And so that is fascinating in itself, Mark. I mean, what are the potential theories as to why they therefore decide to almost create these very visible boundaries, this one ridge after another after another, between the landscape further west and the central plaza that's almost kept within, trapped within these ridges? Man, I wish you could tell me because we haven't

been able to figure this one out. What's clear is that the ridges were not necessary for everyday life. They lived comfortably in a community here without the ridges. And thousands and thousands of other Native people lived in communities all over the southeast and lower Mississippi Valley. They didn't build little hills or ridges to live on like the Poverty Point people. So it does point to, you know, a ceremonial purpose or a need for the society to construct them. And while we don't really have a clue, and we don't have any accurate oral histories

that go back over 3,000 years into the past in this area, one archaeologist named Dr. John Gibson, who did field schools here for maybe 25 to 30 years, he thinks that they were used to ward off basically bad energy or spirits from the West and notice that they're open towards the east of the plaza, allowing the sunrise to come in and bring in good energy and spirits in a nutshell.

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what sorts of artifacts have yourself and fellow archaeologists, have you uncovered from Poverty Point from these urban ridges? We're going to start with the most numerous. And in 2016, Christopher Hayes et al. wrote a really cool paper called Poverty Point Objects Reconsidered. And the artifacts in question are called PPOs or poverty point objects. And the paper, they estimate there's between 12 and 14 million of the single artifact type on the site. there's between 12 and 14 million of the single artifact type on the site. That's tremendous. So what the heck are these little things used for and what even are they? So poverty point objects are shaped earthen ceramic balls that seem to be used for heating purposes to cook food. So in the rest of North America, Native people are cooking food with hot rocks.

But because there's no Native stone on the site and the stone that they did bring, they wanted to use for tools and other useful things, right? Because sometimes they're coming from hundreds of miles away. They created their very own heating rocks, if you want to call them rocks, of course, because they're ceramics. They made them from the dirt themselves. Now, the weird thing is that you don't have to shape these any kind of way for them to work for cooking. And we see other cultures using baked clay objects or baked earthen objects to cook.

But here at Poverty Point, they come pretty distinctly in six standard styles. And there's got to be something to them using these standardized styles. They're meaningful for the people. We have no clue what that meaning is yet, but a good suggestion is that they stand for maybe family or clan groups within this culture. And these styles of poverty point objects are one of the only things that we find, you know, outside the site that point directly back to this culture. And so if you're digging at a site in Mississippi or the Gulf Coast, or even up farther north of the Mississippi Valley, and you find povertyoverty Point objects,

you can tie that site directly back to this culture. It seems to be the epicenter of a culture that stretched out for at least 700 square miles. So those are the most numerous and perhaps the most interesting artifact. But of course, all the exotic stone comes from elsewhere. A lot of it comes from central Arkansas. Some of it comes from the lower Midwest for your grave flints. And a big chunk of different stones and goods comes from the Alabama-Georgia border. And it

looks like everything is arriving here through trade. So that water system, again, the river system is super important to the people. And there was what we call the dock at the very eastern edge of the plaza that we didn't talk about yet, but I'm sure we'll touch on later. Well, we don't need to do later, Mark. Let's delve into it right now. Let's do it right now. So what is this structure we've got on the eastern end of the plaza? Well, not just maybe a structure, but lack of structure. Along the eastern edge of the site itself is a pretty steep escarpment or a bluff. The dock is the only place where you have a gentle slope

into that waterway. So it's possible, although it's not been proven, that this slope was artificially created by the ancient people. The one thing that we can say is at the very top of this gentle slope up from the bayou, there is a constructed ridge. So if you are a first person bringing, you know, goods and ideas to the site, you dock your dugout canoe down there at the base of the waterway. And then you don't see anything at all. You're looking at a slope. You don't see any mounds. You don't see any earthworks. You might smell, you know, the smoke from the cooking fires. You might hear

the people up there. But you don't see any of it until you take that walk up the slope and crest that ridge. And so it's one part of the site that we really do think is meant to show off, to impress outsiders and visitors as you leave the world that you knew and entered the created landscape of Poverty Point. That focus on a created landscape is so interesting, especially when we bring it back to the fact that, as you say, this wasn't an agricultural community or agricultural communities. We think this is hunter-gatherer fishing lifestyles. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And in regards to cooking there, the smell of cooking, so that my mind instantly therefore goes to hearths, evidence of man-made fires. Do you find evidence of hearths within the plaza or at least maybe burnt material that can hint that, yes, there was lots of cooking going on, all of this pottery was being used for housing, storing foods that would have been warmed up, that would have been cooked on a fire? So all the evidence for hearths basically comes from the ridges themselves. So we do find lots of these old hordes sometimes in situ in place in excavations. You do find some evidence of cooking near the top

of the dock there, but you mentioned pottery. So the society did have pottery, but most of it seems to have been imported. Sometimes the pottery was brought from as far away as the Atlantic coast of Florida. So that's a hell of a long journey to bring pottery. And even though they used it, and they may have been experimenting making their own pottery, it wasn't a very high quality because it lacked temper, at least the stuff that may have been made on site. Nine times out of ten, they prefer to use steatite or soapstone for their vessels. And this material comes out of present-day Alabama and Georgia. And unlike most of the other things imported to the site, which likely came in raw form as they were shaped by the craftsmen, right, and the people on site, those steatite vessels may have come fully formed.

and the people on site, those steatite vessels may have come fully formed. They may be the only artifact that provably came in a finished format, just because they were so big and so heavy, if they were carried in big chunks rather than completed forms. Well, having found these various artifacts, as you say, largely in the ridges, it begs the question, what do we think Poverty point was used for by these people? You know, if they've got all these contacts stretching from the Atlantic coast to Alabama, do we think this is almost a place for feasting or the center of communities gathering or maybe even a place of pilgrimage or something like that? You know, Tristan, these are all ideas that have been thrown around. And some archaeologists feel that the site may be exclusively, you know,

ceremonial or exclusively a community created by local people. But I think these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Based on the evidence that I've seen right now, I think that there certainly was a community of some size. We don't have a good estimation for it. It may have been just a few hundred people to maybe one to two thousand for year-round occupation. But I do think that people were brought in for big rituals and ceremonies throughout the year. And there certainly is evidence that large groups of folks believing in this culture and in this place came here for massive construction projects. Maybe the plaza, maybe some of the ridges, and there's certainly good evidence for Mount A right now. So there was

a year-round community. It was a place for exchange of goods and information. And it was a massive, you know, ceremonial site. So there's a lot to be said for this enterprising group of hunters, fishers, and gatherers. Well, you mentioned Mound A there. So let's go to this really stunning structure. Mark, what is Mound A? Mound A is currently the second largest constructed mound in North America, but it certainly was the very largest constructed for its time in just after 1350 BCE or so. And it was the largest mound constructed for about 2000 years. And it is a

marker showing us that the people of Poverty Point, these native folks were ahead of their time for a lot of different reasons. It is 390,000 tons of dirt. And it was constructed in three big phases. First, the very top, the tallest point, which is often called the cone, was constructed. And at the time, it may have been 90 feet tall, but today is about 72 feet high at its apex. And then a platform was built right next to it. And that covers, you know, several acres of space. That's roughly, you know, 33 feet tall. So a big platform in and of itself. And then a little bit of time passed before the construction of a ramp that connected these two features. And the wild bit is about 15 years ago, Dr. T.R. Kidder and his team conducted a big excavation, a terracing of that platform, and a series of, don't quote me on this,

but I think it was 88 soil cores from all throughout the mound. And they look carefully at the dirt. What do you think they found, Tristan? Well, I'm guessing that the soil comes from various different faraway places. Oh, that's a neat idea. But believe it or not, away places. Oh, that's a neat idea. But believe it or not, all the dirt is extremely local. So all the stone is exotic. It's got to be from elsewhere. But all the dirt that we've found used on site comes from the site itself or, you know, just very, very close. It's very distinctive soil called silt loam or less that was deposited here 14 000 years ago the crazy bit is that looking at mount a its size and construction you would think it would take you know decades to build or a hundred years if there was a you know a couple hundred people living here

year round but they see exactly the reverse they look look at the dirt. They use a process called micromorphology to look very carefully at thin sections of the dirt through a microscope. And they don't see any evidence of rainfall during construction that you insect burrows or animal burrows or any kind of disturbance. So what does that mean to us? It means that it was built incredibly quickly, all at once. Between one and three months is Dr. Kidder's best guess based on the lack of disturbance. So not only was the largest constructed mound on the continent at the time, actually in the Western Hemisphere for a few hundred years, so I'll say that much, it was done faster than any construction we have ever seen on the continent. It doesn't matter if it's 3,500 years ago or during the proto-historic period, just, you know, 500 to 600 years ago. This thing went up real quick. Well, I've got to redeem myself, therefore, because it sounds, Mark, then, if that is the case,

one to three months, then these hunter-fisher-gatherer communities, well, there must have been a lot of them there at the same time or the people who built that mound they must have been able to muster a huge amount of manpower to be able to create something so monumental in such a short period of time you got it so the estimation is roughly 10 000 people and that does include your support, but that is fantastic. That is the surprising bit. So it should not surprise us that hunters, fishers, and gatherers could remain sedentary. What surprises us is the complexity of their societies, even 3,500 years ago. What they could accomplish, the amount of labor they can organize,

that the planning involved, and the construction itself, that it's been remarkably stable for over 3,000 years. So a lot of engineers can't make dirt stand without eroding appreciably like this. It's just kind of a magical thing almost. And so current research done by T.R. Kidder is looking into the composition of the dirt itself to see if maybe the people are mixing it something special in order to protect it from erosion, basically. But the evidence for that is not there yet, but it's certainly a thought and that there's something interesting going on. not there yet, but it's certainly a thought and that there's something interesting going on. I guess this also heralds back to what we kind of touched upon earlier with that comparison with Orkney and the importance of making the stone circle, or maybe the wood circle, compared with

its final purpose. Do you think that it is very possible that you have all these groups of people 3,500 years ago coming to a place, a well-known place that is Poverty Point, largely by the Mississippi River, down that ancient motorway. And they're going to somewhere like Mounday to take part in this great building project. The act of making this mound may well have been just as, if not more important than whatever the final purpose of this mound was. I can dig it, man. You're digging into anthropological theory that I think makes perfect sense. And another big thing to keep in mind is costly signaling. So, Mount A being the largest of its time, if you're a first-timer coming up from the dock and cresting

that ridge and looking at the site, seeing the largest mounds and earthworks that you've ever seen or will ever see in your lifetime, because these are the biggest, do you think you'd understand the power and wealth of the community and the culture? Don't you want to be a part of it? Don't you respect it? These are the things that we can say. Although the final purpose of Mound Day may have been ritual and ceremony, because we find a lack of artifacts. We find, you know, a lack of post holes, so no structures on the top. We don't find middens involved. So it does seem to be a very clean space, like the majority of our mounds on site and certainly the plaza but costly signaling is something that we do today and so we understand

it really well it's the same reason why someone you know buys a ferrari instead of a camry you know so one shows your power and wealth it's flashy right a mound is a flashy way of showing your culture your power and your wealth these's flashy, right? A mound is a flashy way of showing your culture, your power and your wealth. These elites who are overseeing the construction, absolutely. I must ask, therefore, keeping on the construction of a mound like Mound A, do we have any evidence from the archaeological record about what sorts of tools they would have been using to create this mound? We really don't have a clue on that one. So at the time, they may have been using to create this mount? We really don't have a clue on that one. So at the time, they may have been using sharpened digging sticks. They could have been using stone

hoes attached to a handle for digging, or they could have been using the scapulae of deer, so the shoulder blades of deer, in order to shift dirt around. But we do see a lot of ancient cultures using just sharpened sticks to do a lot of the moving. But once do see a lot of, you know, ancient cultures using just sharpened sticks to do a lot of the moving. But once you shift the dirt, then they're putting into bags and baskets and carrying it or passing it along to the construction site, maybe with a basket brigade, if you will, in order to construct these things, including Mount A. It's absolutely extraordinary to think, as you said earlier, that mound in particular, the second biggest artificial mound from prehistoric America,

correct me if I'm wrong in that, but from what you were saying, it is extraordinary to think how important this site must have been for communities of these hunter-fisherer-gatherers stretching from the Atlantic coast to Alabama some 3,500 years ago. This almost feels, and once again it's conjecture, it seems like we don't know the answer, but this place was an important centre for tens of thousands of people living this long ago in prehistoric North America. I don't think you're really far off there. It's true that it's not provable, but the size, complexity of the site, including all the exotic and foreign materials that arrived here over a span of 600 years, point to Poverty Point being the place to see and the place to be seen. And that falls into the idea of this being,

you know, at least in some cases, a pilgrimage site for ancient cultures. That's a very popular idea with the archaeologists working on the site right now. But again, it's very hard to falsify. So we do have to take it with a grain of salt, no matter how much we may want to believe it. Well, it's just interesting once again, because it screams similarities with a place like the Ness of Brodka in Orkney, which is also potentially seen as this pilgrimage site with connections all across the British Isles and beyond some 5,000 years ago. I mean, you mentioned those exotic items, and we've talked about some of the stones which are coming from far-flung places and some types of pottery but are there any other key types of exotic archaeological items that have been discovered from poverty point well they're bringing all

kinds of different flints and shirts like nevaculite from central Arkansas. They're bringing a number of different kinds of flint from the lower Midwest. They're bringing Tallahadda quartzite from Alabama. They're bringing Pickwick or Horse Creek chert from out of Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama. Dover flint from the Tennessee River Valley itself. And it's just a massive amount of different form materials, whereas in sites the last few thousand years, even before Poverty Point, you don't find this rich assortment of materials, and you don't find this varied assortment of artifact styles most of these being you know projectile points as far as you know styles of different things so at this point they're not using bows and arrows so all the the points are used as knives or blades or spear points

or most of all the tips of darts that were launched with a tool that we call an atlatl or a spear thrower. So there's, I believe, 16 different styles of projectile points that have been found associated with this culture on site. In the previous period, in the Middle Archaic, there was really only maybe three or four different styles. And the period following poverty point called the Chufuncta or Chula period, you really only find, you know, five or six different heavily used styles. So just the sheer variety of different stones and materials and the variety of point styles, the variety of lapidary or jewelry objects like beads and the very famous owl pendants and other small carved effigies along with other types of greenstone that were shaped into banner stones that were used on an atlatl as what we think may be a counterweight

of some sort. So that's kind of neat. We find a lot of gorgets, which are a flattened piece of stone, often made of limonite, which is an iron ore or slate or shale. they're often engraved. But again, all these things do not come from the site. All the stone has to be imported. They're bringing it in raw and they're shaping these raw stones into artifacts and styles that they're comfortable with, which were so much more varied than previous periods and even periods after the site existed. And so with all of that, the archaeology and the artifacts that you and the team have so far uncovered from the site, how important is poverty points in the story of prehistoric America, I guess in prehistoric USA history? It's essential. This site is not just important to the local community or to the state of Louisiana or to the United States. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And to have that designation,

you have to have a greater importance to the worldwide community for what this site was, the culture that emanated here. It shows us what all of our ancestors, right, could do, could accomplish, even if you're hunting and gathering, right? So it shows us a little bit more about our shared human past. But we do have to focus on the fact that these are native peoples. They are indigenous to the Americas. And it's important for us to be able to tell their story more or fully. With all of that in mind, Mark,

what are you and your team hoping to do at Poverty Point in the future? Well, let me fill you in on my role. So I'm the park manager of the site, and it is my duty to protect, present, and preserve the unique cultural resource and prehistoric resource that is Poverty Point to the public and the world at large. So what I hope to achieve is use all the information provided to me through the realm of archaeology to connect you, to connect the public to this fascinating site and hopes that we can better protect this place for the coming generations. I myself don't do the archaeology. So we do have a station archaeologist, Dr. Diana Greenlee, and she does an incredible job of managing the day-to-day archaeology and the curation of the site and its artifacts, the mounds, the earthworks. But we have field schools from different professors and universities that come to our site. They can stay in our archaeology dorm and they do the hard work of the digging

and creating all the data that we pull from to learn about this ancient place. And I really hope we keep digging, you know, 100, 200 years in the future. And that's one big reason why we've only excavated 1% of the site, or roughly 1%, because we want to create a wonderful representative sample of excavations from different places and the earthworks, but we also want to preserve this place as techniques and technology, knowledge

of treating the site and preserving this place. So once you dig into the ground itself, it destroys what you study. So it has to be done very, very carefully. Absolutely. Excavation is destruction at the end of the day. Mark, it is also fascinating from what you're saying there. If you've only excavated 1 percent of the site and you've already started to learn and you've already started to learn so much about these people and the great connections that they had and how important this site must have been some 3,500 years ago it bodes to be really really exciting in the years ahead to be able to learn more about it to uncover more to do it correctly and to find out even more about it, to uncover more, to do it correctly, and to find out even more about this site's importance in USA's prehistory. Yeah, I'm here for it. That's

what we're here for. So we're here for the entire roller coaster of discovery and letting the evidence speak for itself. I'm not here to put the cart before the horse. Well, Mark, this has been fantastic. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Well, I appreciate you, Tristan. You have a wonderful day. Well, there you go. There was Mark Brink, the park manager at Poverty Point, explaining, giving an overview of what we know about Poverty Point so far. It's extraordinary archaeology, this great centre of prehistoric America. I really do hope you enjoyed the episode today. America has an amazing prehistory, an ancient history, and long

may we continue to dedicate episodes to it, because it is sometimes an area of North America that is overlooked in the history world. So we will give it a spotlight. We will give people like Mark the spotlight to share the stories of places like Poverty Point with as many people as possible. Now, last things from me, if you are enjoying The Ancients

and you want to help us out as we continue our mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible well you know what you can do you can leave us a lovely rating on apple podcast on spotify wherever you get your podcast from it greatly helps us as we continue to grow the podcast and to share these stories with as many people as possible. Spread the word, people. Spread the word. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.