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Motley points made of gray midwestern flints. They were probably status symbols which belonged to an elevated rank of warriors. The photographs in this article are by the courtesy of Carl Alexander and Clarence Webb.
monument which in plan looks like a gigantic bird with spread wings. Mound A stands over 21 meters high; it measures 216 meters from east to west and 194 meters north to south. The site’s major north-south axis (7°-8° west of true north) passes through the mound. A companion structure Motley Mound, a slightly smaller and perhaps unfinished copy of Mound A, lies 2,400 meters to the north. It is east of the site axis, and a ray extended south passes through the interior “plaza” of the town. Along the major north-south line are two smaller conical mounds, Mound B, 225 meters north of the central birdlike mound, and the lower Jackson Mound, 2,800 meters south.
f^edistribution provides the economic foundation of a chiefdom. In order to demonstrate conformity with the chiefdom model, we must establish that redistribution functioned as the primary integrating mechanism of the Poverty Point culture. Unfortunately, certain gaps in the archaeological record, specifically foodstuffs, deprive us of one means of directly confirming the existence of redistribution. However, indirect evidence for economic recirculation lies in the pronounced division between settlements (bluff edge villages vis-a-vis flood plain villages) and in the implications of large labor forces divorced from the pressing responsibility of food provision. The most explicit evidence for redistribution consists of the system of earthworks, planned and built by corvee labor and the network of trade which involved the organized procuration of a wide variety of rocks and minerals from areas as distant as 1,100 kilometers from the Poverty Point site. The prime importance of Poverty Point can be understood in terms of its strategic location near the confluence of six major rivers (presumed trade routes), a position which probably allowed it to regulate the flow of trade materials to the other settlements of its domain.
The control of redistribution and the seat of civic authority in all chiefdoms lies in the hands of people of elevated rank, whom we may simply call the chiefly lineage. This group occupied the peak of a pyramidal social hierarchy, often referred to by ethnologists as a “ramage” or “conical clan.” Lower ranks were normally separated from the upper group and from each other according to primogeniture, a rule by which inheritance passed from chief to eldest son or, as in certain lower Mississippi Valley examples, from the great cacique (or chief) to the eldest son of the cacique’s oldest sister or closest female relative. While most archaeologists do not pretend to be able to recreate the exact details of inheritance and kinship from archaeological materials, most would agree that some patterns among artifacts reflect the operation of social processes.
The reconstruction of social ranking is one area of paleoanthropological interpretation that has been quite successful. Using statistical techniques, I have recently analyzed the patterns of distribution for nearly 19,000 artifacts from the Poverty Point site. I believe that some of these artifacts indicate the status of their owners. Ethno-historical sources show that social ranks, particularly among the Natchez Indians, were expressed
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