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By JON L
North America has never been seriously considered the birthplace of any early complex culture rivaling those of Central and South America. To the minds of most archaeologists, even the “advanced” societies of the southeastern United States, like the prehistoric Middle Mississippian or the protohistoric Natchez and Taensa, consisted at most of small or moderate sized chiefdoms which hypothetically owed their existence to Mesoamerican inspiration.
In a controversial study, A Comparison of Formative Cultures in the Americas, the archaeologist James Ford drew attention to an extensive range of similarities among several early New World cultures of the three millennia preceding the Christian era. He believed that these similarities were a result of two sweeping waves of Pan-american diffusion. The first presumably took the form of periodic colonization by seafaring people who introduced the art of pottery-making from Ecuador to Central and North America; the second involved the spread of ideas rather than a significant movement of people. Ford contended the diffusion of ideas resulted in reciprocal influence among Olmec, Chavin and Poverty Point cultures, each the oldest complex culture in Central, South and North America, respectively.
Ford listed several features shared by these cultures: settlement plans consisting of a single, large ceremonial center surrounded by attendant villages; massive mounds and earthworks; religious practices involving the deification of birds; long-distance trade; and certain classes of artifacts, such as clay figurines, pottery, pseudocelts, microliths and lapidary forms. Similarities between Olmec and Poverty Point cultures seemed particularly close, extending to such details as site orientation (7°-8° west of due north) and pos-
POVERTY POINT
lrst North American Chiefdom
GIBSON
sibly to the form of the earthworks themselves. Michael Coe’s recent work at San Lorenzo, the oldest known Olmec center, has disclosed that the large plateau on which the site is located is a vast geometric earthwork, a configuration that reminds some scholars of the geometric structures of the Poverty Point site in the lower Mississippi Valley. On the basis of these similarities, Ford hypothesized that Olmec culture was responsible for the rapid spread of maize agriculture and new religious beliefs, developments which provided the generating spark for the rise of Poverty Point culture.
Contrary to Ford’s hypothesis, recent studies of Poverty Point culture suggest that complex society, organized on a chiefdom or “conditional” state level, emerged independently in North America at a very early period. Almost sixty radiocarbon and thermoluminescent determinations on Poverty Point materials indicate that the beginnings of this society (ca. 1500 B.C.) may have even predated the Olmec and Chavin cultures by several centuries, a possibility which should not be pressed too strongly given the problems inherent in the dating methods. More importantly, the natural environments of the regions where individual Poverty Point chiefdoms arose meet the prerequisites for the independent origin of chiefdoms and states as outlined in two important hypotheses which we will discuss later. And conclusively, the cultural processes considered necessary for the rise of a complex society under these conditions can be established for Poverty Point culture. These facts lead me to believe that Poverty Point culture can be best understood as an endemic cultural adaptation to the very special kind of riverine environment in the lower Mississippi Valley.
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