Episode 6 Poverty Point America’s Oldest City
Ancient Civilizations of North America
Dr Edwin Barnhart (2018)
Film Review
North America’s first city at Poverty Point (in modern northeast Louisiana) had a population of four to five thousand people. Dating from 3500 BP (Before Present), it demonstrates a clear knowledge of geometry and surveying skills and was clearly master planned by a centralized authority. Built by a large organized workforce, it featured a wide central plaza at the focus of six concentric semicircular embankments, each with hundreds of houses. Five causeways were cut through the embankments leading to the central plaza.
This first North American city also had a number of earthen pyramids located behind the semicircular embankments. Three were built along a perfect North-South axis, indicating a knowledge of astronomy. Archeologists have also found the remains of woodhenges,* in the form of wide post holes arranged in a circle.
Archeological evidence indicates the central plaza (encompassing hundreds of acres) excavated first and covered with a cap of cay to prevent erosion.
No actual houses have survived from Poverty Point, though many post holes and occasional wattle and daub** remain, as well as large mud-carrying baskets used to construct the semi-circular embankments.
Despite millions of artifacts found at Poverty Points, there are no human remains. Large middens found near the embankments suggests its residents were affluent hunter gatherers. In other words, food was so abundant they lived in permanent dwellings year round. Their diet mainly consisted of fish and reptiles, pecans, acorns and walnuts, cooked in simple pits with heated clay cooking balls.
The residents of Poverty Point had a vast trade network involving six major water ways including the Mississippi river. They imported hematite and magnetite (to weight their fishing nets), as well as soapstone bowls from Alabama and Georgia and harder minerals (such as quartz, chert and flint which they carved into jewelry and charms) from Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas and Oklahoma and copper and pottery from the Great Lakes.
Archeologists have also discovered numerous smaller population centers from 3500 BP scattered around Louisiana. All left behind similar cultural artifacts (pyramids, large central plazas, pottery, cooking balls and precious stone jewelry and charms).
The city at Poverty Point survived over 1000 years.
*A woodhenge is a Stone Age henge (ring shaped bank and ditch) and timber monument.
**Wattle and daub is a composite building method in which woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw.
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