Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:
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Poverty Point is an archaeological site north of New Orleans that experts believe was a major trading center between 1700 BC and 1100 BC.
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A new study has proposed that the impressive 1.5-square-mile site was the work of an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society — a departure from previously held beliefs.
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This discovery of artifacts from the Midwest and Southeast regions of the United States confirms that Poverty Point was a major trading center.
Around 1,500 BC, there was a civilization really It has started to take off. Ancient Egypt was entering a golden age known as the New Kingdom, the Hittites took root in the Middle East, the Shang dynasty came to power in China, and the Olmecs emerged in the tropical lowlands that would one day become Mexico. At the same time, in the lower Mississippi Valley—some 350 miles from the mouth of North America’s largest river—hunter-gatherers of an increasingly egalitarian society were constructing some of the oldest and most impressive earthwork monuments in the Western Hemisphere.
Today known as poverty point – a name derived from the 19th-Century plantation that was near the archaeological site — this nearly 3,500-year-old structure (built sometime between 1700 BCE to 1100 BCE) is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And while the size of the site is certainly impressive, spanning about 1.5 square miles, these ancient people too Moved the equivalent of 140,000 dump trucks of garbage without using horses or wheels.
It has long been known that Poverty Point served as a sort of trading center for ancient hunter-gatherers throughout the southeastern and midwestern U.S. But a new study published in the journal Southeastern Archaeology— Archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) are reexamining the origin story of this impressive site, asking why Ancient people built these mounds in the first place.
In general, years-long deliberate monument construction is the work of hierarchies, such as the pharaohs who ruled Egypt, kings who ruled the Hittites, and Chinese rulers who ruled over their subjects. But Kidder and his co-author Seth Grooms (a former WashU PhD graduate and member of North Carolina’s Lumbee tribe) believe that Poverty Point was the work of an egalitarian civilization that came with increased severe weather and massive flooding in the region.
This goes against the earlier belief that this society must have been ordered in nature, similar to the society that built the Cahokia Mounds near present-day St. Louis, Missouri, a thousand years later.
“The Western view is that they’re not going to travel all that distance and do all that work unless they’re getting something of economic value out of it,” study co-author Tristram Kidder told WASHW magazine. ampersand. “We believe they felt a moral responsibility to repair a broken universe.”
One of the main pieces of evidence that Poverty Point holds some spiritual significance is that there has never been any archaeological evidence of permanent habitation at the site. “The old paradigm of people living continuously at the poverty point for centuries has broken down, and we need a new framework,” Kidder said. ampersand.
Instead, they found materials such as quartz crystals from Arkansas, soapstone from northern Georgia, and fragments of Great Lakes copper. Kidder and Grooms believe that Poverty Point was a temporary gathering place for thousands of people to do what people do: socialize, trade, worship and work. This makes the poverty point a historical outlier in the Old World, as Grooms points out in another article. ampersand In 2023.
“These people came together to build these incredible monuments, and according to the archaeological evidence, they did it without any kind of institutional hierarchy, wealth differentiation, or intensive agricultural system,” Grooms said at the time. “All this was once considered a prerequisite for social complexity.”
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