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Poverty Point
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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