Poverty Point culture

Poverty Point culture is an archaeological culture that corresponds to an ancient group of Indigenous peoples who inhabited the area of the lower Mississippi Valley and surrounding Gulf coast from about 2200 BC - 700 BC.

Archeologists have identified more than 100 sites as belonging to this mound builder culture, which also formed a large trading network throughout the eastern part of what is now the United States.

Dating of the Watson Brake site in present-day Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, where eleven earthwork mounds were built beginning about 3500 BC, shows it to be the earliest, dated mound complex in the Americas. It was begun well before the construction of the pyramids in Egypt. Next oldest is the Poverty Point Culture, which thrived from 2200 BC- 700 BC, during the late Archaic period in the Americas. Evidence of this mound builder culture has been found at more than 100 sites, including the Jaketown Site near Belzoni, Mississippi. The largest and best-known site is at Poverty Point, which lies on the Macon Ridge near present-day Epps, Louisiana.

The Poverty Point culture may have hit its peak around 1500 BC. It is one of the oldest complex cultures, and possibly the first tribal culture in the Mississippi Delta and in the present-day United States. The people occupied villages that extended for nearly 100 miles (160 km) on either side of the Mississippi River.

Poverty Point culture was followed by the Tchefuncte and Lake Cormorant cultures of the Tchula period, a local manifestation of the Early Woodland period. These descendant cultures differed from Poverty Point culture in trading over shorter distances, creating less massive public projects, completely adopting ceramics for storage and cooking, and lacking a lapidary (stone-carving) industry.

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