Part 2

Numerous postmolds have been found at many Poverty Point sites, but so far no other complete patterns have been identified. On the western side of the plaza at the Poverty Point site, an archaeologist excavated some unusually large pits. If these were postmolds, they held posts the size of grown trees! Too big for ordinary or even superordinary residences, these huge posts are said by some to have been markers for important days like equinoxes and solstices, an American Stonehenge.

FOODS

When the real size and magnificence of Poverty Point came to be realized in the 1950s, it was believed that such developments were possible only when agriculture or a similarly efficient means of food production were known. In North America this agriculture was assumed to be based on corn, beans and squash because when Europeans arrived in the New World, these were the staple crops. But evidence for agriculture involving these foods has so far not been found in indisputable Poverty Point contexts. This lack was not altogether due to recovery or identification problems because plant remains have turned up at several sites, including Poverty Point itself.

Poverty Point culture might have developed without agriculture. One idea was that ordinary hunting, fishing, and collecting in special localities could have been the basis of Poverty Point livelihoods (Gibson 1973). In areas with generous expanses of elevated lands and swampy river bottoms, wild plant and animal foods were not only bountiful, they were present year-round. By precise timing of food-getting efforts with nature’s seasonal rhythms, Poverty Point peoples could have gotten all the food they needed and probably as much extra as they desired.

Another suggestion was that Poverty Point life might have involved farming all right, but of a different kind. Mounting evidence showed that a unique brand of horticulture had developed in eastern North America before Poverty Point culture ever began. The plants that were grown included sunflower, sumpweed, probably goosefoot, and possibly others. Other than sunflower, you would be right in thinking these are not widely cultivated species today, although they are common garden plants. They are notorious weeds and modern science has produced a variety of herbicides to get rid of them. However, they are easy to propagate. Native cultivation need not have involved anything more than scattering seeds over open ground. These plants produced enormous quantities of nutritional seeds. Thus, from the point of view of return for amount of work invested, this kind of gardening would have been economically efficient. Unlike other agriculture, this kind of farming—if it really can be called that—would have fit in quite well with hunting, fishing and plant collecting.

We are only starting to find out what kinds of wild foods were eaten, and of these, animals are better known than plants because their bones are more resistant to decay and are easier to find. From the Gulf to the northernmost inland territories, meat sources included fish, reptiles, small and large mammals, and birds (Smith 1974; Gagliano and Webb 1970; Byrd 1978; Jackson 1981). Shellfish were collected at coastal sites, where brackish-water clams were abundant. Oysters were not commonly eaten. Inland villagers do not seem to have eaten freshwater mussels at all. Freshwater fish seem to have been the most consistent animal food, occurring at practically every well-preserved site throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley. Gar, catfish, buffalo fish, sunfish, and other species were caught. Various kinds of turtles were also commonly taken. Alligators and even snakes were sometimes eaten. Deer were important sources of meat everywhere, probably ranking close to fish in terms of overall contribution to local diets. Cottontail and swamp rabbits, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, and other small mammals were hunted, as were turkeys, sandhill cranes, and other kinds of birds. There seems to have been considerable region-to-region and perhaps site-to-site differences in the importance of small mammals and birds.

Plant foods identified from Poverty Point refuse and cooking pits include hickory nuts, pecans, acorns, walnuts, persimmons, wild grapes, wild beans, hackberries, and seeds from honey locust, goosefoot, knotweed, and doveweed (?) (Shea 1978; Woodiel 1981; Jackson 1981; Byrd and Neuman 1978).

These remains are far from a complete list of Poverty Point table fare. Food residues have only been recovered at a handful of sites, far too few to make sweeping generalizations about Poverty Point subsistence. Differences in archaeological collecting methods and in preservation conditions from site to site inhibit detailed comparison. Present information will not allow us to say what foods were preferred or to work out their relative contributions to villagers’ diets.

Due to these problems, only general conclusions can be drawn. Even though the quest for food remains has only just begun in earnest, the failure of corn, beans and squash to turn up anywhere casts considerable doubt about the traditional view of Poverty Point peoples as farmers. As a matter of fact, of these three crops important in Southeastern Indian diets at A. D. 1600, only squash has been found anywhere in the eastern United States as early as Poverty Point times (Byrd and Neuman 1978). Since we do not know if the goosefoot and knotweed seeds found at Poverty Point sites were domesticated or wild varieties, we cannot be certain whether or not Poverty Point peoples had gardens of these native plants. All we really know, at present, is that Poverty Point communities throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley ate wild plants and animals. In the final analysis, we may anticipate that there was no single, uniform pattern of obtaining food in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Geographic and cultural differences were just too great.

EVERYDAY TOOLS

Hunting and collecting were basic to Poverty Point economy everywhere, and rather specialized equipment was designed to aid in these food quests. The bow and arrow was unknown. The javelin was the main hunting device. These throwing spears were tipped with a variety of stone points. Some points, like the ones illustrated in Figure 5, were exclusive Poverty Point styles, but many were forms which had been made for hundreds, even thousands, of years before.

Casting distance and power were increased by the use of atlatls, or spear-throwers. Shaped like oversized crochet needles, atlatls were held in the throwing hand with the hooked end inserted into a shallow socket in the butt of the spear (Figure 6). Hurled with a smooth, gliding motion, the javelin was released toward the target while the atlatl remained in the hand.

Atlatl hooks were sometimes made of carved antler (Webb 1977, Figure 26), and polished stone weights supposedly were attached to the wooden handles. These atlatl weights came in a variety of sizes and shapes, including rectangular, diamond, oval, and boat-shaped bars and a host of unusual forms (Figure 7). Some were quite elaborate with lustrous finishes and engraved decorations. Repair holes reveal their value to owners.

The hunter also used plummets (Figure 8). These objects were ground from heavy lumps of magnetite, hematite, limonite, and occasionally other stones. Shaped like plumb bobs or big teardrops, they often had encircling grooves or drilled holes in the small end. Several explanations of their function have been suggested, but the idea that they were bola weights seems most likely.

Other kinds of hunting equipment, such as nets, snares, traps, etc., were probably used by Poverty Point hunters, but because they were made of materials that decay easily, their use can only be determined because the bones of nocturnal animals occur among food remains. The presence of fishbones, ranging from tiny minnows to giant gar, implies that fishermen used some sort of device or technique for mass catches. None of the fishing equipment, known from contemporary villages like Bayou Jasmine near Lake Pontchartrain (Duhe 1976), has been recognized at Poverty Point villages.

We know that men and women must have used other tools to obtain food, but we are unable to say which of the many other chipped and ground items were used in this way. Gathering plant foods such as nuts, acorns, seeds, fruits, berries, greens, and “vegetables” probably did not require implements, other than what may have been handy. Digging tubers would have required some sort of device, but it need not have been anything other than a convenient pointed stick. However, hoe-like tools have been found at several Poverty Point villages and in abundance at Terral Lewis, a small hamlet about 10 miles southeast of Poverty Point. Some of these objects have coatings which look like melted glass. The coatings are fused opal, produced when the “hoes” cut through sod. These artifacts might have been real hoes used to till gardens, but in view of the total absence of domesticated plant remains from Poverty Point sites, this function remains unconfirmed.

Foods were prepared with a variety of implements. Meat could have been cut up with the aid of heavy chipped bifaces (“cleavers”) and sharp flakes or blades (“knives”). Battered rocks, pitted stones, and mortars might have served to pound nuts, acorns, and seeds into flour and oil (Figure 9).

Cooking was done over hearths and in earth ovens. The earth oven was an ingenious Poverty Point invention. Nothing more than a hole in the ground to which hot baked clay objects were added, the earth oven was an efficient heat-regulating and energy-conserving facility. Small objects of baked clay were used to heat these baking pits (Figure 10). These little objects were hand molded. Fingers, palms, and sometimes tools were used to fashion dozens of different styles. These objects are a distinguishing hallmark of Poverty Point culture. So common are they that archaeologists refer to them as Poverty Point objects.

Modern experiments in earth oven cooking have been conducted (Hunter 1975; Gibson 1975). It was discovered through these experiments that the shapes of clay objects used determined the intensity and duration of temperatures inside the pits. This might have been a way of regulating cooking conditions, just like setting the time and power level in modern microwave ovens. Another important aspect of earth oven cooking is that it would have conserved firewood, which must have been a precious commodity around long-occupied villages.

Like modern Americans, Poverty Point peoples had a variety of vessels and contraptions for cooking, storage, and simple containment. They used vessels—pots and bowls—made of stone and baked clay. Stone vessels were chiseled out of soft sandstone and steatite (a dense, soft rock). Most stone vessels were plain but a few had decorations. Holes drilled near cracks show that these vessels were often repaired. Steatite was imported by the tons to the Poverty Point site from quarries in northern Georgia and Alabama (Webb 1944, 1977).

The Poverty Point pottery vessels mark the initial appearance of this kind of container in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Although not abundant, their presence has been accorded great historical significance by archaeologists. One archaeologist even argued that the art of making pottery was learned from Indians in South or Central America or through intermediaries along the Atlantic and eastern Gulf coasts. This view is very controversial. Other archaeologists prefer to think that ceramics, whatever their origin, were made by later people and that their appearance in Poverty Point garbage deposits was due to subsequent disturbances which churned and mixed earlier and later remains. And then there are other archaeologists who contend that Poverty Point people developed and made pottery largely on their own.

The extreme differences in pottery throughout the various Poverty Point territories support the latter view. In order to prevent cracking, some Poverty Point potters added vegetable fibers to the clay; others put sand and grit, bone particles, and hard lumps of clay; others added nothing. Decorations do seem to have followed rather universal styles, but each group of potters seems to have modified them to suit local tastes and to have added new features of their own.

Many other tools were used in everyday tasks of building houses, butchering animals and making other tools. We know Poverty Point peoples used stone tools for these jobs and probably also used wood, bone and antler ones, as well. Most of these were very similar to those used by earlier people.

Items such as hammerstones, whetstones, polishers, and others, were used mainly in a natural condition and required little or no preparation themselves. The characteristic shapes and signs of alteration that permit them to be recognized today got there through use and not intentional design.

Other tools were carefully shaped. Gouges, adzes, axes, and drills fall into this category. The objects were chipped from large pieces of gravel or big flakes into desired shapes. Often polish or tiny grooves appear on the working edges of these tools, which leads us to suspect that they were used to chop and carve wood, dig holes, and drill substances.

Some of these items, especially celts and adzes (cutting tools with the blades set at right angles to the handles), have counterparts of ground and polished stone. These smoothed objects were made by chipping, battering, grinding, and polishing in combination or singly. Whether these more elaborate forms were used like their chipped varieties is difficult to say, but they probably were.

There is another group of chipped stone artifacts which is one of the most abundant tool classes at the Poverty Point and Jaketown sites and which occurs in respectable numbers at many Poverty Point villages (Webb 1977:42). These mysterious objects are called microliths. The most common form has been dubbed a Jaketown perforator (Haag and Webb 1953: Ford and Webb 1956). Typically, perforators are tiny artifacts, made from blades and flakes; they have one bulbous end and a narrow point. They were originally presumed to be drills or punches, but experiments showed that they could have been worn-out scrapers, resulting from whittling antler, bone, and perhaps wood (Ford and Webb 1956:77). Their abundance at Poverty Point and Jaketown suggests a rather commonplace function, and perhaps the experimental results have been rightly interpreted. Recently, however, an archaeologist made a revealing discovery. He noticed an obstruction in the bottom of an unfinished hole that was drilled in the center of a narrow-ended, rectangular stone tablet. Using a straight pin, he dislodged a small flint object. It was the broken end of a Jaketown perforator; so perhaps, they were used as drills after all!

SYMBOLIC OBJECTS AND CEREMONIES

Poverty Point culture had many unique objects, but perhaps most important were its artifacts of personal adornment and symbolic meaning. In no other preceding or contemporary culture were so many ornaments and status symbols produced. Stone beads, made mostly of red jasper, predominated, but many other unusual objects were manufactured. Pendants were made in a multitude of geometric and zoomorphic shapes. Dominant were birds, bird heads, animal claws, foot effigies, turtles, and open clam shell replicas (Figure 11). Small, in-the-round carvings of “locusts” and fat-bellied owls were made and were evidently widely circulated, even among non-Poverty Point peoples (Webb 1971). One pendant from Jaketown (Webb 1977:Figure 25) was a polished tablet with a carved human face. Copper and galena beads and bangles were worn at the Poverty Point and Claiborne sites. Perforated human and animal teeth, cut out sections of human jaws, bone tubes, and bird bills (Webb 1977:52-53), dredged from the bottom mucks of the bayou below the Poverty Point site, reveal that much more ornamentation of perishable materials has disappeared.

It would hardly be apt to describe the folks at Poverty Point as gaudily dressed, but by comparison with their country neighbors living in little villages and with their trade partners in Arkansas, Mississippi, and other sections of Louisiana, they must have been quite “fancy” and impressively clothed. Because so much personal ornamentation occurs at Poverty Point itself, it is conceivable that social distinctions there were more numerous and more rigid than anywhere else at the time. There was only one Poverty Point. It must have seemed like New Orleans on Mardi Gras, Mecca during the pilgrimage, and Mexico City on market day—all rolled into one.

Hundreds of solid stone objects, such as cones, cylinders, spheres, cubes, trapezoids, buttons (Figure 11), and others, were also made by skilled craftsmen, mainly at the giant Poverty Point site (Webb 1977:48). Since utilitarian functions for these small objects are difficult to imagine, they too must have had ornamental, symbolic, or, perhaps, even religious meanings.

Religious and other symbolic purposes might have been served by stone pipes. Most were shaped like ice-cream cones or fat cigars. Other smoking tubes, made of baked clay, may have been the “poor man’s” versions of sacred pipes in regional communities outside the sphere of direct Poverty Point control. At the Poverty Point site, tubular clay pipes may have served more ordinary, nonreligious purposes. The presence of pipes, however, suggests that they might have been the first calumets used by Southeastern Indians; calumets being the most sacred symbols of intertribal relations, used to proclaim war and peace and to honor and salute important ceremonies and visiting dignitaries.

Other sacred objects may have included the small, crudely molded, clay figurines depicting seated women, many of whom appear to be pregnant (Figure 12). Heads were nearly always missing, although whether or not they were snapped off deliberately during ceremonies is purely conjectural. Perhaps, smaller, decorated versions of clay cooking objects may have had religious or social symbolic value as well.

It is also suspected that regular everyday artifacts could be turned into sacred ones under certain circumstances. This probably explains the 200 to 300 steatite vessels that were broken and buried in an oval pit a little southwest of the biggest mound at the Poverty Point site (Webb 1944). They must have been an offering of some kind. Other deposits of steatite vessels, both whole and broken, were found at the Claiborne site on the Gulf Coast (Gagliano and Webb 1970; Bruseth 1980). Religious and social meaning can be ascribed to virtually anything, and there need not be any recognizable intrinsic value or unusualness. No doubt thousands of other artifacts functioned in this nondomestic realm of behavior, and we just do not know what they are.

Religion is one of the most powerful motive forces in culture. So it was in Poverty Point culture. It provided sanctions, direction, meaning, and explanation of great mysteries. It was central to group organization and leadership. It was the single most important source of power and was probably the underlying motivation for communal building projects and other group activities.

But unlike the other early great religions of the New World—Chavin in South America and Olmec in Lowland Mexico—Poverty Point religion seems to have lacked a special religious artwork. There are a few symbolic artifacts, such as fat-bellied owl pendants and locust effigies that have a widespread distribution (Webb 1971), but these objects often occur in earlier contexts and in contemporary, non-Poverty Point cultural situations. The lack of a widespread religious art style argues against the possibility of a universal state religion and implies that local populations had independent systems of worship.

The mounds and the specialized objects that functioned in ceremonial realms were probably all involved in some way with religion and ritual. Yet the nature of Poverty Point religion and worship remains unknown. Ancestor worship has been mentioned as one possibility. Amulets and charms, if correctly identified, imply beliefs in spirit forces or perhaps nature spirits. Bird representations in stone and earth suggest that birds may have been deified. Bird symbolism was an integral part of Southeastern religions during the Christian Era, and possibly its beginnings were in Poverty Point beliefs.

There is little information on Poverty Point burial practices. This is primarily due to the fact that there have been so few excavations, and those have been largely confined to residential areas in villages.

Mound B at Poverty Point covered an ash bed which contained fragments of burned bone (Ford and Webb 1956:35). Most were tiny and unidentifiable, but one was the upper end of a burned human femur, proving that at least one person had been cremated and covered by the earthen tomb.

Further evidence of cremation, as well as in-flesh burial, derives from the Cowpen Slough site near Larto Lake in central Louisiana. Although conceivably later, the burials were completely enveloped by Poverty Point occupational deposits which seemed to be undisturbed. Since the burial area was not completely excavated, many question marks still remain. However, we know that adults and at least one juvenile were buried. Some were in tightly bent positions, but the positions of others were not determined (Baker and Webb 1978; Giardino 1981). One small pit in the burial area contained fragments of an unburned adult in the bottom and an undisturbed cremation of a juvenile near the top (Giardino 1981). All of the excavated interments were close together, and the presence of surrounding postmolds (Baker and Webb 1978) may indicate burial beneath a house floor or some other structure. Except for a set of deer antlers, placed at the pelvis of one of the individuals, there were no apparent burial offerings; nearby artifacts seemed to be just household trash.

The only other known human remains that apparently date to the Poverty Point period were some teeth and a lower jaw dredged from the bottom mucks of Bayou Macon, the small stream that lies at the foot of the bluff beneath the Poverty Point site. These were not burials, however, but ornaments! The molars were perforated at crown bases, and the jaw section may have been cut into shape. These objects were probably more than just decorations; they may have served as amulets, magical charms, battle trophies, or religious objects symbolizing revered ancestors.