Poverty Point: the incredible archaeological find you probably never heard about, because of ideology
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...
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.
What is Poverty Point in more detail?
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. Like those early Eurasian cities, Poverty Point sprang from a great river, since transport by water, particularly of bulk goods, was in early times infinitely easier than transport by land. Like them, it formed the core of a much larger sphere of cultural interaction. 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.
Seen from the air – a ‘god’s-eye’ view – Poverty Point’s standing remains look like some sunken, gargantuan amphitheatre; a place of crowds and power, worthy of any great agrarian civilization. Something approaching a million cubic metres of soil was moved to create its ceremonial infrastructure, which was most likely oriented to the skies, since some of its mounds form enormous figures of birds, inviting the heavens to bear witness to their presence. But the people of Poverty Point weren’t farmers. Nor did they use writing. They were hunters, fishers and foragers, exploiting a superabundance of wild resources (fish, deer, nuts, waterfowl) in the lower reaches of the Mississippi. And they were not the first hunter-gatherers in this region to establish traditions of public architecture. These traditions can be traced back far beyond Poverty Point itself, to around 3500 BC – which is also roughly the time that cities first emerged in Eurasia.
As archaeologists often point out, Poverty Point is ‘a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone’, so the staggering quantities of lithic tools, weapons, vessels and lapidary ornaments found there must all have been originally carried from somewhere else. The scale of its earthworks implies thousands of people gathering at the site at particular times of year, in numbers outstripping any historically known hunter-gatherer population. Much less clear is what attracted them there with their native copper, flint, quartz crystal, soapstone and other minerals; or how often they came, and how long they stayed. We simply don’t know.
What we do know is that Poverty Point arrows and spearheads come in rich hues of red, black, yellow and even blue stone, and these are only the colours we discern. Ancient classifications were no doubt more refined. If stones were being selected with such care, we can only begin to imagine what was going on with cords, fibres, medicines and any living thing in the landscape treated as potential food or poison. Another thing we can be quite sure of is that ‘trade’ is not a useful way to describe whatever was going on here. For one thing, trade goes two ways, and Poverty Point presents no clear evidence for exports, or indeed commodities of any sort. The absence is strikingly obvious to anyone who’s studied the remains of early Eurasian cities like Uruk and Harappa, which do seem to have been engaged in lively trade relations: these sites are awash with industrial quantities of ceramic packaging, and the products of their urban crafts are found far and wide.
Despite its great cultural reach, there is nothing at all of this commodity culture at Poverty Point. In fact, it’s not clear if anything much was going out from the site, at least in material terms, other than certain enigmatic clay items known as ‘cooking balls’, which can hardly be considered trade goods. Textiles and fabrics may have been important, but we also have to allow for the possibility that Poverty Point’s greatest assets were intangible. Most experts today view its monuments as expressions of sacred geometry, linked to calendar counts and the movement of celestial bodies. If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images.
We can’t possibly know the details. But it’s more than just speculation to say that ancient foragers were exchanging complex information across this entire region, and in a highly controlled fashion. Material proof comes from close examination of the earthen monuments themselves. Through the great valley of the Mississippi, and some considerable way beyond, there exist other smaller sites of the same period. The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometrical principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early peoples throughout a significant portion of the Americas. The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings, and then extended to the laying-out of massive earthworks.
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.
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.