Poverty Point's Plaza as Monumental Earthwork

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Research at Cahokia, Raffman, and other sites has shown the folly of assuming that plazas are unaltered because they are level and dwarfed by the topography of surrounding earthworks. Their unassuming topography can conceal evidence of significant anthropogenic alterations, past activities, and buried features. Although Ford and Webb’s classic monograph on Poverty Point made no mention of the large, flat area enclosed within their newly recognized C-shaped earthen ridges, other than to indicate that it contained a scarcity of artifacts, it is not a recent notion that earthmoving activities took place there. Multiple studies have documented an original undulating surface that was filled in places with occupational debris and loaded fills. Is today’s relatively flat plaza, however, as pedantic as filling in potholes to create a level surface? Or do we need to look at the Poverty Point plaza in a new and holistic way – as a monumental earthwork with a complex construction history? We argue for the latter, bringing together what is known about the anthropogenic creation of the Poverty Point plaza from our work (since 2006) as well as other studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39026.0