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AN INTRODUCTION TO LOUISIANA ARCHAEOLOGY
which Mound B was built, he exposed a large burned area of ash, charcoal, and small fragments of charred bone, one of which was said to be the proximal end of a human femur. Near the burned area, "in the ground surface beneath the ash bed in the North 10-20 trench," he found a fire pit containing thirty-two baked-clay balls.5 The only conclusion that can be safely drawn is that, since Mound B overlies the baked-clay objects, it must date from Poverty Point times or later.
Ford found as he dug into the mound proper that it was constructed in several stages. The demarcations of the basket loads of dirt used to build Mound B were plainly visible in his excavations, for the baskets ^	left impressions on the clay. Woven in a simple plaited style, the bas-
1	kets were 11 to 22 inches in diameter. There were soil stains, as well,
that were judged to be animal-hide containers which averaged 17.1 inches in diameter. It has been estimated that 30 million, 50-pound basket-loads, or .75 million cubic yards, of earth went into the construction of Mounds A and B and the ridges at Poverty Point.6
Carl Kuttruff's excavations in the ridge area were the only other excavations of the site published in detail. He concluded, as had Ford and Webb in the original site report, that the ridges functioned as low elevations upon which people lived, built structures, dug fire pits, and left behind their trash. Clearly, the archaeological data indicate that many ridge areas were lived upon during different periods of their construction. Nevertheless, since Ford and Webb found no certain evidence of postmolds and Kuttruff reported only one, the inference that the ridges at the Poverty Point Site served as substructures for houses v lacks substantiation.7
' Ford and Webb were able to isolate the basic traits of Poverty Point Culture from analysis of their excavation data and almost 20,000 artifacts from the type site. By 1968 they had examined about 70,000 artifacts from the Poverty Point Site, many of which were systematically collected by Carl Alexander of nearby Epps. The efforts of a number of such dedicated nonprofessionals have made Poverty Point, almost
5.	Ford and Webb, Poverty Point.
6.	Webb, The Poverty Point Culture.
7.	Carl Kuttruff, "The Poverty Point Site: North Sector Test Excavations," Bulletin
of the Louisiana Archaeological Society, No. 2, pp. 129-51; Ford and Webb, Pov-
erty Point.
POVERTY POINT CULTURE
indisputably, the largest systematically surface-collected site in North America. It is indeed a tribute to their efforts that these controlled surface collections have been the very basis for distribution studies relative to the occupational history of the site.8 By 1977 Webb was able to report that he and his colleagues had examined 120,000 artifacts from this and other sites of the Poverty Point Culture.
The Poverty Point baked-clay object is one of the most numerous artifacts: there are over 18,000 from this type site alone (Pis. 9 and 10). These objects have been recovered from many sites of the Poverty Point and other cultures, but nowhere are they as numerous, as variable in form, and as ornate as at the Poverty Point type site. They have been sorted into five general types and labeled, in order of their frequencies: melon-shaped, cylindrical, cross-grooved, biconical, and spheroidal. Each type comprises a number of variants, such as melon-shaped twisted; cylindrical with lateral incising; cross-grooved, multiple crosses; biconical extruded; and spheroidal dimpled. There are also atypical specimens, such as amorphous, biscuit-shaped, cuboidal, rectangular, finger-squeezed (some showing fingerprints of adults and children), mushroom-shaped tetrahedral, barrel-shaped, and pyramidal. One of the baked-clay objects from Poverty Point exhibits a human face. Many of these artifacts have been found in fire pits intermixed with ash and charcoal. Anywhere from one dozen to two hundred have been recovered from a single pit, and most of the specimens "in a given pit are of a single type, indicating the individual housewife's or family's preference for a certain shape or decoration."9
At the Poverty Point Site most of the baked-clay objects, as well as stone vessel fragments and potsherds, were found in the north and south sectors close to Bayou Magon. Since all of these specimen categories are considered culinary items, it is not at all surprising that they would have been used and discarded close to a water source. Most of the potsherds are fiber-tempered specimens or Tchefuncte wares,
8.	Ford and Webb, Poverty Point-, Webb, "The Extent and Content of Poverty Point Culture"; Jon L. Gibson, "Intersite Variability at Poverty Point: Some Preliminary Considerations on Lapidary," Southeastern Archaeological Conference Bulletin, No. 12 (1970), 13-20; Clarence H. Webb, "Settlement Patterns in the Poverty Point Culture Complex," in Broyles and Webb (eds.), The Poverty Point Culture, 3-12.
9.	Webb, "The Extent and Content of Poverty Point Culture/' 308.