Poverty Point
A monument built by people who did not farm
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Poverty Point in Louisiana is an earthwork of six concentric half-circle ridges, built over three thousand years ago. Monumental architecture without agriculture breaks a textbook sequence in which farming surplus is assumed to come first. Poverty Point is not alone — Göbekli Tepe raises the same objection in Anatolia — but it is the clearest American case. Stone on the site comes from up to a thousand kilometres away along river networks, showing a trading reach that needed no state to function.
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By the Mississippi lie six great earthen half-circles, set one outside another, and a mound shaped like a bird. Every basket of soil was carried there. What makes the site unusual is that the people who built it lived by hunting, fishing and gathering — not by farming.
Sources
- UNESCO verdensarv: Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point
- Kidder, Antiquity 85 (2011)
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