Poverty Point: A Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

by Jon L. Gibson

The majority of the population apparently lived on the embankments in the central area, but appreciable numbers of people lived outside. Important “suburbs” were scattered along the bluff between the central district and Motley Mound, to the west of Motley Mound, to the west and south of the bird mound, on the Jackson Place, and south to Lower Jackson. Other peripheral neighborhoods will no doubt eventually be discovered.

Nothing much is known about Poverty Point houses and furnishings. Probable house outlines were reported from Jaketown (Ford, Phillips, and Haag 1955: Figure 10) and Poverty Point (Webb 1977:13). Stains in the soil, called postmolds, showed these structures to have been circular and small, around 13 to 15 feet in diameter. One possible burned house at Poverty Point appears to have been a semi-subterranean structure, framed with bent poles and covered with cane thatch and daub (dried mud). Interior furnishings were not recognized.

Numerous postmolds have been found at many Poverty Point sites, but so far no other complete patterns have been identified. On the western side of the plaza at the Poverty Point site, an archaeologist excavated some unusually large pits. If these were postmolds, they held posts the size of grown trees! Too big for ordinary or even superordinary residences, these huge posts are said by some to have been markers for important days like equinoxes and solstices, an American Stonehenge.

FOODS

When the real size and magnificence of Poverty Point came to be realized in the 1950s, it was believed that such developments were possible only when agriculture or a similarly efficient means of food production were known. In North America this agriculture was assumed to be based on corn, beans and squash because when Europeans arrived in the New World, these were the staple crops. But evidence for agriculture involving these foods has so far not been found in indisputable Poverty Point contexts. This lack was not altogether due to recovery or identification problems because plant remains have turned up at several sites, including Poverty Point itself.

Poverty Point culture might have developed without agriculture. One idea was that ordinary hunting, fishing, and collecting in special localities could have been the basis of Poverty Point livelihoods (Gibson 1973). In areas with generous expanses of elevated lands and swampy river bottoms, wild plant and animal foods were not only bountiful, they were present year-round. By precise timing of food-getting efforts with nature’s seasonal rhythms, Poverty Point peoples could have gotten all the food they needed and probably as much extra as they desired.

Another suggestion was that Poverty Point life might have involved farming all right, but of a different kind. Mounting evidence showed that a unique brand of horticulture had developed in eastern North America before Poverty Point culture ever began. The plants that were grown included sunflower, sumpweed, probably goosefoot, and possibly others. Other than sunflower, you would be right in thinking these are not widely cultivated species today, although they are common garden plants. They are notorious weeds and modern science has produced a variety of herbicides to get rid of them. However, they are easy to propagate. Native cultivation need not have involved anything more than scattering seeds over open ground. These plants produced enormous quantities of nutritional seeds. Thus, from the point of view of return for amount of work invested, this kind of gardening would have been economically efficient. Unlike other agriculture, this kind of farming—if it really can be called that—would have fit in quite well with hunting, fishing and plant collecting.

We are only starting to find out what kinds of wild foods were eaten, and of these, animals are better known than plants because their bones are more resistant to decay and are easier to find. From the Gulf to the northernmost inland territories, meat sources included fish, reptiles, small and large mammals, and birds (Smith 1974; Gagliano and Webb 1970; Byrd 1978; Jackson 1981). Shellfish were collected at coastal sites, where brackish-water clams were abundant. Oysters were not commonly eaten. Inland villagers do not seem to have eaten freshwater mussels at all. Freshwater fish seem to have been the most consistent animal food, occurring at practically every well-preserved site throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley. Gar, catfish, buffalo fish, sunfish, and other species were caught. Various kinds of turtles were also commonly taken. Alligators and even snakes were sometimes eaten. Deer were important sources of meat everywhere, probably ranking close to fish in terms of overall contribution to local diets. Cottontail and swamp rabbits, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, and other small mammals were hunted, as were turkeys, sandhill cranes, and other kinds of birds. There seems to have been considerable region-to-region and perhaps site-to-site differences in the importance of small mammals and birds.

Plant foods identified from Poverty Point refuse and cooking pits include hickory nuts, pecans, acorns, walnuts, persimmons, wild grapes, wild beans, hackberries, and seeds from honey locust, goosefoot, knotweed, and doveweed (?) (Shea 1978; Woodiel 1981; Jackson 1981; Byrd and Neuman 1978).

These remains are far from a complete list of Poverty Point table fare. Food residues have only been recovered at a handful of sites, far too few to make sweeping generalizations about Poverty Point subsistence. Differences in archaeological collecting methods and in preservation conditions from site to site inhibit detailed comparison. Present information will not allow us to say what foods were preferred or to work out their relative contributions to villagers’ diets.