Radical Cosmological Ritual Intervention at Poverty Point

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.

The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built over hundreds of years to express political and economic power by a limited group of people, our data suggests the earthworks were built rapidly over an exceptionally brief span of months to perhaps a year by a large voluntary labor force drawn from across eastern North America. We hypothesize that Poverty Point was a place of revelation; the construction of the earthworks was a radical, cosmological ritual intervention, spurred by perceptible climate and environmental changes across the Southeast after ca. 3300 cal BP. The earthworks at Poverty Point are among the materialized remains of ritual performances intentionally initiated by Indigenous people seeking to rebalance an unbalanced world.

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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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38861.0