This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

V Poverty Point Culture
There are more than one hundred known Poverty Point occupation sites in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, as well as other closely related cultural manifestations in Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. At six of the Poverty Point occupations in Louisiana, no less than twenty-eight radiocarbon dates have been established, ranging from 2040 b.c. to 865 b.c. The thermoluminescent process has yielded dates of 1090 B.C. to 750 B.C. from six other assays of Poverty Point occupations in Louisiana and Mississippi.1 These dates suggest that diagnostic Poverty Point developments began along the Gulf Coast and spread inland through the Mississippi River Basin, where they reached their zenith.
Sites are located along stream levees, on terrace edges, at stream-lake junctions, and in coastal environments. In each of these milieus the inhabitants could exploit a wide variety of natural resources. Poverty Point occupations characteristically occurred as clusters of small sites around a large regional center. The sites vary in size from the Poverty Point Site itself, which covers more than one square mile and at the time of its construction was the largest earthwork in both Americas, to sites that are only about 100 feet in diameter. Clarence Webb notes that some of the larger sites, supposed regional centers, are horseshoeshaped or oval. This is certainly true at the Poverty Point, Claiborne,
1.	Webb, The Poverty Point Culture-, Cynthia f. Weber, "Thermoluminescent Dating of Poverty Point Objccts," In Bettye J. Broyles and Clarence H. Webb (cds.), The Poverty Point Culture, Southeastern Archaeological Conference Bulletin, No. 11 (1970), 99-107.
POVERTY POINT CULTURE
Cole Crossroads, and Teoc Creek sites. However, his attribution of groups of six to eight small, domed mounds, arranged in arcs or in an arcuate pattern, to the Poverty Point Culture, is to a degree sagacious speculation. To the best of my knowledge, Mound G at the Jaketown Site in west-central Mississippi is the only such mound ever tested and reported in the literature.2 Since no primary diagnostic artifacts of the Poverty Point Culture were retrieved from Mound G, the most that can be said of it is that it was probably constructed during Poverty Point times. Almost without exception these small mound sites were constructed or occupied by several successive cultures, and until the mounds themselves have been examined individually, their cultural attribution will remain speculative.
Poverty Point, the type site for this culture, is located near the present community of Epps, in West Carroll Parish. By about 1500 B.C. the inhabitants of this rich riverine environment had developed a way of life that produced a stable supply of and presumably a surplus of food items. Efficient hunting and gathering techniques, perhaps augmented by the cultivation of native plants and even the tropical cul-tigen squash, increased the quantity of food, while decreasing the number of people required to produce it. Socially elite classes capable of mandating the construction of massive geometrical and, possibly astronomically oriented earthworks may also have developed. Jon Gibson postulated that the Poverty Point society was a stratified organization ruled as a chiefdom and that the "culture arose independently as a consequence of local cultural adaptations to the specific environmental conditions of the Lower Mississippi Valley." Other archaeologists have reasoned from comparisons of particular artifacts and of massive ceremonial centers that the Poverty Point Culture was Meso-American in origin. The exact nature of the spark that ignited the patterns of thought and behavior that grew to typify the Poverty Point Culture will probably never be firmly documented, nor is this requisite. It seems likely, in the absence of more pragmatic evidence, that both local adaptation and Meso-American influence provided the impetus for the earliest developmental stages of the Poverty Point Culture. Undoubtedly the location of the site was also a profoundly
2. Webb, The Poverty Point Culture-, Ford, Phillips, and Haag, The Jaketown Site.