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

---

g
m
INCHES
PLATE 10
Artifacts of the Poverty Point Culture: a-k, baked clay objects; I-s, human figurines.
POVERTY POINT CULTURE
America before and during Poverty Point times, was the source for the technology at Poverty Point.
Projectile points, many of which are types continuing from late in the Meso-Indian Era, are also numerous at Poverty Point (PI. 11). They include over 12,000 specimens, most of which were made from the local cherts. Many others, however, were manufactured from exotic flints, novaculites, and fossiliferous cherts transported from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. A particularly outstanding example is the type called the Motley point (Pi. 11, a—d). It is a carefully finished, distinctive triangular point with large, deep comer notches, an expanding stem, and a straight to convex base. Motley points are one of the most popular point types from the site, and 80 percent of them are made of flints from the Ohio River area, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Furthermore, it is notable that although projectile points occur in all sectors of the Poverty Point Site, Motley points show a differential treatment and predominate in the northern sector.
Celts, hoes, and adzes make up the remainder of the chipped-stone assemblages. Since adzes are particularly numerous, woodworking must have been a significant task. Besides these large tools, there are thousands of smaller chipped-stone blades and flakes that exhibit use wear from cutting and scraping (PI. 12). As we might expect, chipped-stone tools are found in all areas of Poverty Point, but they are proportionally more numerous in the north and south sectors nearest Bayou Ma?on.
Among the ground-stone implements found are mealing stones, one of which is a metate with a trough "formed by to-and-fro movement, another Mesoamerican trait.''12 There are also whetstones, pitted stones, hammerstones, saws, reamers, polishers, atlatl weights, gorgets, pipes, tubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, cubes, and a variety of other multifaceted objects made from limonite, hematite, chert, sandstone, slates, shales, siltstone, talc, galena, cannel coal, and jasper (Pis. 13 and 14). Ground-stone plummets are found regularly at most sites of the Poverty Point Culture, but they are particularly numerous (numbering 2,790) at the type site. Made of hematite and magnetite imported
12. Ibid., 42.