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Poverty Point

Hunter-gatherers who, with no farming and no metal, hand-carried nearly a million cubic yards of earth into nested ridges and mounds beside Bayou Maçon.

The great earthwork-building effort ceased around 1100 BC and the centre was abandoned; its template of mounds and plazas echoed in the Woodland cultures that followed.

See it on the interactive map →

Borders over time

The atlas holds 3 border frames for Poverty Point — the shape you scrub through changes in 1700 BC · 1399 BC · 1099 BC.

Moments from the Chronicle

• 1500 BC Poverty Point rises In northeast Louisiana, foragers build the largest earthworks of Archaic North America — six nested ridges and great mounds beside Bayou Maçon — without farming or metal.

Further reading

• The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point: Place of Rings Jon L. Gibson · 2001

  The definitive monograph on the Poverty Point earthworks and the hunter-gatherers who built them.

• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann · 2005

  Pre-contact synthesis that situates Poverty Point in the deep history of the Americas (broad context).

Sources

• Poverty Point culture — Wikipedia