Figure 10. Baked Clay Heating Objects. a, Cylindrical; b-c, Cross-Grooved; d, Biconical Grooved; e, Biconical Plain; f, Melon-Shaped. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.
Modern experiments in earth oven cooking have been conducted (Hunter 1975; Gibson 1975). It was discovered through these experiments that the shapes of clay objects used determined the intensity and duration of temperatures inside the pits. This might have been a way of regulating cooking conditions, just like setting the time and power level in modern microwave ovens. Another important aspect of earth oven cooking is that it would have conserved firewood, which must have been a precious commodity around long-occupied villages.
Like modern Americans, Poverty Point peoples had a variety of vessels and contraptions for cooking, storage, and simple containment. They used vessels—pots and bowls—made of stone and baked clay. Stone vessels were chiseled out of soft sandstone and steatite (a dense, soft rock). Most stone vessels were plain but a few had decorations. Holes drilled near cracks show that these vessels were often repaired. Steatite was imported by the tons to the Poverty Point site from quarries in northern Georgia and Alabama (Webb 1944, 1977).
The Poverty Point pottery vessels mark the initial appearance of this kind of container in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Although not abundant, their presence has been accorded great historical significance by archaeologists. One archaeologist even argued that the art of making pottery was learned from Indians in South or Central America or through intermediaries along the Atlantic and eastern Gulf coasts. This view is very controversial. Other archaeologists prefer to think that ceramics, whatever their origin, were made by later people and that their appearance in Poverty Point garbage deposits was due to subsequent disturbances which churned and mixed earlier and later remains. And then there are other archaeologists who contend that Poverty Point people developed and made pottery largely on their own.
The extreme differences in pottery throughout the various Poverty Point territories support the latter view. In order to prevent cracking, some Poverty Point potters added vegetable fibers to the clay; others put sand and grit, bone particles, and hard lumps of clay; others added nothing. Decorations do seem to have followed rather universal styles, but each group of potters seems to have modified them to suit local tastes and to have added new features of their own.
Many other tools were used in everyday tasks of building houses, butchering animals and making other tools. We know Poverty Point peoples used stone tools for these jobs and probably also used wood, bone and antler ones, as well. Most of these were very similar to those used by earlier people.
Items such as hammerstones, whetstones, polishers, and others, were used mainly in a natural condition and required little or no preparation themselves. The characteristic shapes and signs of alteration that permit them to be recognized today got there through use and not intentional design.
Other tools were carefully shaped. Gouges, adzes, axes, and drills fall into this category. The objects were chipped from large pieces of gravel or big flakes into desired shapes. Often polish or tiny grooves appear on the working edges of these tools, which leads us to suspect that they were used to chop and carve wood, dig holes, and drill substances.
Some of these items, especially celts and adzes (cutting tools with the blades set at right angles to the handles), have counterparts of ground and polished stone. These smoothed objects were made by chipping, battering, grinding, and polishing in combination or singly. Whether these more elaborate forms were used like their chipped varieties is difficult to say, but they probably were.