Preserving Poverty Point

Poverty Point Park Manager Mark Brink leads three annual foraging hikes across Louisiana’s sole UNESCO World Heritage site.

Picture this. Three thousand years before the arrival of Columbus, you set out from your village in what maps now identify as Missouri or Alabama, Arkansas or Tennessee. After a parting wave to the few faces you’ve ever known, you slip into a dugout canoe. Afloat for weeks, passing from one waterway into another, you’re headed for the place you know only through legend. And since that legend conjures a site where thousands live and trade, and man has reshaped the earth so that it rises toward the heavens, you assume it can’t possibly be real.

Then you arrive, and your whole world changes. Around the dock swirl hundreds. In their strange language, they offer food and drink, places to sleep for the night as they accompany you away from the dock and up the ridge. At last, you see it. In the distance rises an earthen mound around which bustle hundreds more. Another 2,000 years will pass before the first recorded use of the word “metropolis,” but this is precisely what you behold.

“This place was all about drama,” says John Zumwalt, an interpretive ranger at Poverty Point World Heritage Site. Zumwalt stands at the dock, a 50-yard stretch of cleared bank along Bayou Macon. It’s his favorite place on the 470-acre grounds of this National Historic Landmark. From the dock, he climbs the same route people took upon arrival thousands of years ago. “They built the ridge to help prevent flooding,” he says, “but they also wanted to block the view of the city so that you had to climb to see it. The people here were showmen. They even put colors on the outside of the mound to make it more impressive.”

The people of Poverty Point decorated objects with zigzags, spirals, spheres, grids and other images. Archaeologists believe their intricate designs prove an affinity for abstract thought.

Constructed between 1,700-1,100 B.C., the “city” here contained five earthen mounds and six semi-elliptical concentric earthen ridges that surround a 35-acre plaza. During that time, it was the largest earthen mound complex in North America.

Today, Poverty Point — closest town Epps (pop. 346) — is Louisiana’s sole UNESCO World Heritage Site. For 600 years, the people who lived here displayed what current Park Manager Mark Brink describes as “unusually sophisticated techniques” for a society of hunter-fisher-gatherers. Building the site on Macon Ridge — an ecotone, or transitional area between two environments — made that life possible. The elevated ridge perched on the western edge of the Mississippi River floodplain kept them safe from seasonal flooding and provided an abundance of native plants and wild game. This allowed them to thrive here throughout the year.

To provide a sense of what daily life in that era entailed, Brink leads three annual foraging hikes through the site. Today, visitors from Louisiana and Texas follow him across the plaza. Every few minutes, Brink stops before a tree or bush to provide a new name: pepper vine, persimmon and pawpaw, yaupon holly, muscadine and black walnut. Chewing on leaves, grasses, berries and grapes, he notes how the Poverty Point people used native plants for sustenance, seasoning and as hallucinogens to connect with “the beyond.”

Besides the year-round bounty they reaped from the land, the people here, who predated the use of bows and arrows, hunted wild game with atlatls. Constructed of wood, typically just under two feet long, an atlatl is a highly effective handheld lever that ends in a hook that launches darts for hunting. Hunters hurled these darts much as you serve a tennis ball.

At 72 feet tall, 710 feet long and 660 feet wide, the largest mound at Poverty Point took approximately 15.5 million basket loads of earth and approximately one month to build. Lacking local flint, the people here traded hundreds of miles away for the materials they forged into spear points. Mark Brink demonstrates the use of an atlatl, predecessor of bow and arrow, for hunting.

“It’s the sportsman’s paradise,” Brink says before he bullseyes a bale of hay 30 yards away. The bountiful land and abundance of animals here gave the Poverty Point people time to prepare for trade. When archaeologists began researching the site in 1913, they noted evidence of a thriving material culture and well-ordered society that devoted much of its time to creating goods, including owl pendants made of red jasper stone and ceramic human figurines. Their trading network reached hundreds of miles in all directions — as far as Iowa in the north and the Appalachians in the east.

“All of this is a work in progress,” Brink says, noting that archaeologists discovered a new mound here in 2013. “We’re just scratching the surface. We want to continue to push the envelope in what we learn about the site, and we want to do everything we can to preserve it.”

One detail archaeologists have learned about the Poverty Point culture continues to fascinate Zumwalt. “There’s no evidence of warfare,” he says. “Name another city that went 600 years with no war.” Although we may never know why the people here lived in uninterrupted peace, Zumwalt cites one theory: “So many ethnic groups converged here, and because they all agreed that his place was sacred, it became neutral territory.” As he gazes upon the largest of the site’s earthen mounds, Zumwalt pauses in awed silence, much as, wide-eyed, you would have done upon arrival all those years ago.