What is Poverty Point in short?

Emphasis in the text below is mine.

In modern-day Louisiana there is a place with the dispiriting name of Poverty Point. Here you can still see the remains of massive earthworks erected by Native Americans around 1600 BC. With its plush green lawns and well-trained coppices, today the site looks like something halfway between a wildlife management area and a golf club. Grass-covered mounds and ridges rise neatly from carefully tended meadows, forming concentric rings which suddenly vanish where the Bayou Macon has eroded them away (bayou being derived, via Louisiana French, from the Choctaw word bayuk: marshy rivulets spreading out from the main channel of the Mississippi). Despite nature’s best efforts to obliterate these earthworks, and early European settlers’ best efforts to deny their obvious significance (perhaps these were the dwellings of an ancient race of giants, they conjectured, or one of the lost tribes of Israel?), they endure: evidence for an ancient civilization of the Lower Mississippi and testimony to the scale of its accomplishments.

Archaeologists believe these structures at Poverty Point formed a monumental precinct that once extended over 200 hectares, flanked by two enormous earthen mounds (the so-called Motley and Lower Jackson Mounds) which lie respectively north and south. To clarify what this means, it’s worth noting that the first Eurasian cities – early centres of civic life like Uruk in southern Iraq, or Harappa in the Punjab – began as settlements of roughly 200 hectares in total. Which is to say that their entire layout could fit quite comfortably within the ceremonial precinct of Poverty Point. (...) People and resources came to Poverty Point from hundreds of miles away, as far north as the Great Lakes and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south.

(...)

Today, Poverty Point is a National Park and Monument and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite these designations of international importance, its implications for world history have hardly begun to be explored. A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state, Poverty Point makes the Anatolian complex of Göbekli Tepe look like little more than a ‘potbelly hill’ (which is, in fact, what ‘Göbekli Tepe’ means in Turkish). Yet outside a small community of academic specialists, and of course local residents and visitors, very few people have heard of it.

(...)

Published in 2004, this remarkable discovery by John E. Clark, an archaeologist and authority on the pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica, has been greeted by the scholarly community with responses ranging from lukewarm acceptance to plain disbelief, although nobody appears to have actually refuted it. Many prefer simply to ignore it. Clark himself seems surprised by his results.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

A more detailed explanation is given at the end of this post.

Why is it important?

The traditional historical or archaeological understanding of political organization of society separates societies into four categories: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states (1, 2, 3, 4). It proposes that as human society became more complex, its hierarchies became more pronounced, that this is inevitable. As an extension of this, it treats the least hierarchical, or in other words "most egalitarian" form of society, hunter-gatherers (foragers), as lacking any complex form of societal organization or achivement.

This narrative also ties the rise of the state to invention of agriculture, thus treats pre-agriculture societies as lacking complex structures and organizations.

Numerous examples contradict this quasi-social Darwinist hypothesis, such as Göbekli Tepe, which was -for its time- a gigantic settlement created by hunter-gatherers, and they are almost never heard of. In this way, Poverty Point, despite being an even more important finding that defy the traditional narratives about human history, is heard of even less.

Maybe even more importantly, this hypothesis is used to justify the existence of existing hierarchies, such as capitalism or stratified societies. The Better Angels of Our Nature by the famous pro-capitalist ideologue Steven Pinker, for example, uses this argument. This book had a very wide reach, and was presented by Bill Gates as "one of the most important books I’ve read—not just this year, but ever."

Why is it ignored?

Let’s first ask why even some experts apparently find it so difficult to shake off the idea of the carefree, idle forager band; and the twin assumption that ‘civilization’ properly so called – towns, specialized craftspeople, specialists in esoteric knowledge – would be impossible without agriculture. Why would anyone continue to write history as if places like Poverty Point could never have existed? (...) The real answer, we suggest, has more to do with the legacy of European colonial expansion; and in particular its impact on both indigenous and European systems of thought, especially with regard to the expression of rights of property in land.

Here it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune already to be living in territories coveted by European settlers. This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth-century jurists came to call the ‘Agricultural Argument’, a principle which has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working. The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labour’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke’s disciples, didn’t do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts.’ In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvée labour and debt peonage.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

There is one more reason I can think of. For clarification, I haven't progressed into the cited book much further than this point, so I don't know if they mention this later, however, justifying hierarchies based on a narrative of "historical progress" has a more general reason than the "agricultural argument" made by colonialists: it works to justify pretty much any existing hierarchy. Capitalism, nation-states, authoritarianism, you name it—all of it can be justified by saying this is the price we pay for complex societies (and progress), that there is no other way unless we want to give up most of what we have. In fact, Pinker does exactly this for capitalism (and neoliberalism). So I very much suspect this ideological approach plays a role in even experts overlooking such an obviously important finding.

The book I'm using as the source for this post, The Dawn of Everything, is written by two archaeologists. It's a great book I recommend to anyone. It turns the traditional understanding of history and pre-history, especially about "equality", upside down. It shows enough evidence to poke so many and giant holes in the frameworks that approach history as if it's linear or is one of "progress", and I've only read 1/3 of it yet. Poverty Point is just one of many examples.

Carli Lloyd & Alexi Lalas react
I've can't with the USMNT anymore. I have been so invested with the team over the years but US Soccer has one consistent failure after another. Yesterday after the failed Copa America campaign to tune back into what others are saying and once again I hear the same thing: US Soccer isn't going to change and stay the course! So there you have it everyone! Wondering what folks outside the USA think about our situation, what do you recommend or change if you could?

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

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Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

An update for this topic: I've always used the number of Steam reviews for a game as a rough proxy for the game's audience size. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Steam effectively made this canon in one of their recent sales. They had a Hidden Gems category and then broke the game list out into different tiers based the number of reviews each one had. I saved their taxonomy so I could use it here.

Feel free to tag or group your recommendations based on these if you like:

All the categories above, except for the last one, are how Steam defined their different tiers. I have some qualms with them using "Cult Classic" there, but I'm going to follow suit for consistency's sake.

I myself added the last category, because I think there are plenty of games worth mentioning with more than 1000 reviews that still have a solid Hidden Gem vibe but have since found bigger audiences and "graduated" from the label.

Curious if any of the succulent-lovers on Tildes have any tips/tricks for soil composition. I've been using the basic succulent mix from my local hardware store for years, but I've had some issues with rot. Reddit seems to think that soil composition is at fault for just about all succulent ills, so I've adjusted my mix to be about 50% perlite/sand 50% organic (a.k.a the basic succulent mix).

Still seems like the new mix doesn't dry out quite as fast as the internet thinks it should, though. Does going even more inorganic make sense? My guess from a few years of reading about succulents is that they would probably be happy in even 80-90% inorganic soil to keep their roots dry, as long as they were watered when they needed it. No clue if that's right, though.

JCPhoenix is out today, so I went ahead and filled in!

Bad day for Red Bull on their own track. Max messed up, and Checo is a bit of a Haas sandwich!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

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• No grey market sales
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If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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