But when did it begin?
DEFYING EXPECTATIONS
I’M OUT NEAR THE WESTERN edge of Poverty Point, a very mysterious archaeological site in northeast Louisiana, climbing the second biggest earthwork mound in North America. Built around 1430 BC,14 a century before the pharaoh Tutankhamun took the throne in ancient Egypt, it’s often referred to as “Bird Mound,” because of a supposed resemblance to a bird with outstretched wings flying east. Slumped and ruined in places, it does have something of that appearance today, particularly when viewed from the air, but an archaeological reconstruction of how the entire mound would have looked in antiquity does not support the bird interpretation. More prosaically and more usually, therefore, it’s known simply as Mound A.
It reaches 72 feet in height.15 Monks Mound at Cahokia, 500 miles to the north, is taller by 28 feet, and also more massive, but 2,500 years younger and the work of a settled agricultural civilization. Mound A, on the other hand, was made by hunter-gatherers,16 as was the entire Poverty Point complex, where the oldest element of the site, Mound B, has been dated as early as 1740 BC.17
The sides of Mound A at its base measure 710 feet east to west and 660 feet north to south (as compared to 720 feet east to west and 910 feet north to south for Monks Mound). Mound A’s volume is estimated at 8.4 million cubic feet, a number hard to visualize, but Diana Greenlee, station archaeologist at Poverty Point, offers a good analogy. “Take a standard American football field,” she suggests, “and make it 146 feet tall. It’s that much dirt.”18
Some archaeologists still give credence to the notion that Mound A is an enormous bird effigy since “birds are important within the iconography of Native Americans past and present of the southeastern United States.”19 But not so long ago, just as was the case with Monks Mound, the experts felt they didn’t need to invoke Native Americans, or indeed any human agency, to explain Mound A. It and Motley Mound (2 kilometers north of the Poverty Point complex) were judged to be:
Of natural origin, solitary outliers, the only ones for many miles in any direction, of the geological formations found in the bluffs to the east and the west of the Mississippi river; islands left by the drainage which cut the present river valley. Their appearance would easily deceive someone who was not somewhat familiar with such deposits.20
This confident piece of misinformation, put out in 1928 by respected archaeologist Gerard Fowke, was among a number of factors that delayed proper investigation and recognition of Poverty Point. And again, as happened at Monks Mound, when the amazing structure could no longer be shrugged off as natural there were still many who sought to deny Native Americans the credit for it, attributing it instead to some imaginary group of prehistoric Caucasian settlers who in the course of time were overrun by “savage” Native Americans.21
All archaeologists now agree that the half dozen mounds and other earthworks at Poverty Point are man-made. All agree likewise that Caucasian settlers (no matter how appealing the idea continues to prove with the general public) were NOT in any way involved, and that Native Americans made them. Such disputes and debates as did occur on the road to reaching these conclusions were more around the level of sophistication of the site, the amount of manpower thought necessary to build it, and the degree of socioeconomic complexity that would have been required to see it through.
We’ll not go into detail here, since we’ve seen already that the mainstream view for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that large-scale monumental constructions like Mound A at Poverty Point could only have been made by equally “large-scale, centralised and hierarchical societies” that had “the administrative means to carry out such achievements and to organise the large, settled populations whose labour is required.”22 Hunter-gatherers, the prevailing theory proclaimed, could never have generated sufficient surpluses, nor put the necessary hierarchical organization in place, to make such projects viable. Living from hand to mouth, their concerns were entirely focused on survival. Productive agricultural societies, by contrast, were wealthy enough to lift the burden of the daily struggle to survive from the shoulders of talented individuals, thus allowing a class of specialists—architects, surveyors, engineers, astronomers, and others—to emerge and to master their skills.
It was realized from the first archaeological surveys in the 1950s that Poverty Point was ancient, but it was not initially assumed to be very ancient. Hitherto the oldest mounds in America north of Mexico were thought to be Early Woodland (e.g., Adena) in origin, dating between 1000 BC and 200 BC—although clustered toward the latter end of that period. Two initial C-14 dates, explains Professor Jon L. Gibson of the University of Louisiana, “seemed to indicate that the Poverty Point mounds were not only contemporary with Early Woodland but overlapped the earliest part of the Middle Woodland Hopewellian mound-building period.”23 In consequence, “pushing the mounds back to the time of Poverty Point was not that drastic a conceptual jump.”24
Indeed, despite being older than any other mounds previously encountered by archaeologists in North America, the evidence from Poverty Point was accepted with relative ease. That it was not the subject of the usual catfights and rival claims, Gibson suggests, was in part because of the general assumption of the profession in the 1950s and 1960s that “mound building, pottery, agriculture, sedentism, and large populations were … an integrated complex. … This all or nothing association … promoted the assumption of an agricultural base for Poverty Point despite the lack of direct evidence.”25
Nor would direct evidence of agriculture ever be forthcoming, for, as subsequent excavations have proved, Poverty Point was not the work of agriculturalists, but of hunter-gatherers.26 This was paradigm-busting in its way, but archaeologists do hate a busted paradigm, so some wriggle room was found. “Planned large-scale earthworks,” commented Science magazine in 1997, “were previously considered to be beyond the leadership and organisational skills of seasonally mobile hunter-gatherers. Poverty Point was considered the exception, and its extensive trade was cited as evidence for sophisticated socioeconomic organisation.”27
Schematic of Poverty Point indicating principal mounds and geometric ridges.
The notion that trade rather than agriculture fostered a sufficiently complex and prosperous society to get the mounds built proved satisfactory to most archaeologists. The two younger (“Hopewellian”) dates turned up in the initial excavations subsequently proved to be out of context. No one now disputes that the oldest structures at Poverty Point go back to around 1700 BC—fully 1,500 years earlier than the first Hopewell earthworks—that the site flourished for 600 years, and that it was abandoned and left deserted at around 1100 BC.28
THE WORLD’S LARGEST PREHISTORIC SOLSTICE MARKER?
THERE ARE SIX MOUNDS AT Poverty Point, labeled A, B, C, D, E, and F. Of these Mound B is the oldest, perhaps as old as 1740 BC, as we’ve seen. Mound F, where construction began sometime after 1280 BC,29 is the youngest. And Mound D (also known as “Sarah’s Mound”) was not the work of the Poverty Point culture at all, but was a much later addition by the Coles Creek culture some time after AD 700.30
Thus it is the four mounds, A, B, C, and E, that form the key elevations of old Poverty Point. Mound A looms massively over all of them. Despite its huge presence, however, it is not the definitive feature of the site, and neither are any of the other mounds. That role is reserved for a complex earthwork consisting of a series of six concentric ridges, originally up to 9 feet high, forming together a gigantic geometrical figure resembling a half octagon or the letter C, with a diameter of ¾ of a mile. When the lengths of all the ridges are added together they total almost 7 miles.31 The ridge crests are up to 100 feet wide, as are the ditches between the ridges, but they were much damaged by plowing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and today vary from a few inches to at the most about 6 feet in height.32
When archaeology began at Poverty Point in 1952, the ridges were so insignificant that they went unnoticed for about a year.
The late William G. Haag, one of the original excavators, gave a candid account33 of his reaction when he saw them for the first time in aerial photographs shown to him in 1953 by his colleague James Ford—who didn’t initially reveal where the photographs had been taken:
“You know where that site is?” Ford asked.
“Well, it’s got to be in the Ohio River Valley,” Haag replied. “No place, except that area in the East where you get complex earthworks like that.”
Simulation of Poverty Point’s geometric ridge system in its prime.
Haag clearly had in mind the geometrical earthworks of Ohio, such as High Bank and Newark, reviewed in the last chapter, but he was in for a surprise.
“You’ve walked all over that site,” said Ford.
“Not I,” insisted Haag. “I’ve never been to that site.”
But then doubt set in, he looked closer and finally exclaimed: “That’s Poverty Point!”
Haag may have been a little slow in recognizing the ridges, but he was decades ahead of everyone else when he joined forces with astronomer Kenneth Brecher34 in 1980 to coauthor a paper in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society titled “The Poverty Point Octagon: World’s Largest Prehistoric Solstice Marker.”35
Haag and Brecher supposed the ridges had once formed a complete octagon but that the eastern half had been “washed away.” However:
The western half is intact and well-defined. It is intersected in four places by broad avenues, radiating out from a common center. … The west-northwest and west-southwest avenues have astronomical azimuths of approximately 299o and 241o respectively, accurately pointing to the summer and winter solstice sunset directions at the latitude of the site (32o37' N).36
Subsequent research proved Haag and Brecher wrong in their assumption that the Poverty Point ridges had originally formed an octagonal shape,37 a matter that anyway has no bearing on their solstice thesis, which depends exclusively on the angles of the avenues in what survives of the figure today.
If they’re right about this, then it would confirm a much deeper lineage for the astronomical and geometrical memes that we’ve followed back in time through the Mississippian and Hopewell and Adena earthworks.
MASTER PLAN
IN THE JANUARY 1983 ISSUE of American Antiquity the alignments along the avenues that Haag and Brecher had proposed were questioned by Robert Purrington, an astronomer at Tulane University. He agreed that in the epoch of Poverty Point, “the sun would have set, at the solstices, at azimuths of 241o and 299o.”38 He disagreed, however, that these were the azimuths of the west-southwest and west-northwest avenues, which he put at 239 degrees and 290 degrees, respectively. He concluded that these avenues “very poorly mark the solstices. … There are no obvious solar alignments.”39
Haag and Brecher responded in the same issue that the discrepancy between their azimuths and those of Purrington appeared “to arise mainly from the difference in the location of the center of the earthwork. “Purrington,” they complained, “has located the viewing center at least 100 m to the east-northeast of the center we have found.”40 They repeated their assertion that “for the latitude of Poverty Point, the summer and winter solstice sunset azimuths are 241o and 299o, respectively, in good agreement with the orientatons of the southwest and northwest avenues. Such a solstitial alignment, while not surprising, seems hard to doubt in the Poverty Point earthwork.”41
Purrington continued to sound like he doubted it, yet in a confusing and self-contradictory manner. In 1989 he published a paper in Archaeoastronomy titled “Poverty Point Revisited: Further Consideration of Astronomical Alignments.”42 In it he recalculated the azimuth of the west-southwest avenue from his previous figure of 239 degrees to a revised figure of 240 degrees that, he now stated, gave “an excellent match to the setting of the sun at the winter solstice (241o).”43 His azimuth for the west-northwest avenue, however, remained the same as before at 290 degrees, thus missing “the summer solstice setting azimuth by as much as 9o” and therefore “almost certainly not intended to mark this solar standstill. The symmetry of the site then suggests that neither is a solar solstice alignment.”44 As a final equivocation, however, Purrington conceded that “a counter-argument would take into account the special importance attached to the winter solstice standstill by the native American Indians.”45
There the matter rested until 2006, when archaeologists launched a magnetic gradiometer survey at Poverty Point. Completed in 2011, the survey revealed the traces of no fewer than thirty great circles of wooden posts that had once stood in the plaza east of the geometric ridges, “some built only inches away from the previous ones, as if the posts were erected, removed sometime later, moved a slight distance, then rebuilt.”46
According to archaeologist Diana Greenlee, who was closely involved in all aspects of the investigation, the postholes located were straight-sided and flat-bottomed, nearly 1 meter wide and 2 meters deep, while the circles they formed varied in diameter from 6 meters to 60 meters.47 Unfortunately, though, as Greenlee concedes, the project was confined almost exclusively to remote sensing:
We didn’t excavate a complete circle, or even a significant arc of one. So there is a lot we don’t know about the circles. We don’t know how many different kinds of post circles are represented. We don’t know how high the posts were. We don’t know if there were walls between the posts. We don’t know if they had roofs. We don’t know what, if anything, they did inside the circles. We don’t know how many post circles were visible in the plaza at any one time. Someday I hope to excavate a larger area of the plaza circles so that we can find answers to these questions.48
One possibility, surely worthy of further investigation, is that what the survey found were the archaeological fingerprints of a series of “woodhenges” at Poverty Point. Very much like the Woodhenge at Cahokia—also constantly moved and adjusted, as we saw in chapter 18—they were perhaps used in conjunction with other features to create sight lines that would manifest sky-ground hierophanies at the solstices and equinoxes.
At any rate, even without the circles, the case for significant solar alignments at Poverty Point was greatly strengthened when Ohio archaeologist and archaeoastronomer William Romain, one of the sharpest thinkers in this field, rolled up his sleeves and got involved. His paper on the subject, coauthored with Norman L. Davis and published in Louisiana Archaeology in 2011, used newly acquired Lidar data, and refined archaeoastronomical calculations, to conclude that “Brecher and Haag were right in their assessment more than thirty years ago—i.e. Poverty Point does incorporate solstice alignments … [and] may indeed be the world’s largest solstice marker.”49
The alignments, however, turn out not to be those that Brecher and Haag originally proposed. Instead, with the advantage of the new data, Romain and Davis were able to identify two locations “of special importance in the design of Poverty Point.” Referring to these locations as Design Point 1 (DP1) and Design Point 2 (DP2) they note:
Line DP1 to Mound B is aligned to the summer solstice sunset.
Line DP1 to Mound E is aligned to the winter solstice sunset.
Viewed from Mound C, the summer solstice sun will set over Mound B.
Viewed from Mound C, the winter solstice sun will appear to set not over but rather into the side of Mound A. The placement of Mound C … allowed for a long sight line to Mound A, but also resulted in the location for Mound A in a place that seems not-symmetrical with the overall site plan.
A line from DP1 through the central plaza of the site marks the azimuth of the equinox sunset along the northern edge of Mound A.50
According to Davis, an eyewitness to the latter phenomenon, the sun appears to “roll down the northern edge of Mound A before sinking into the western horizon.”51
Poverty Point is “a center place,” Romain and Davis assert, “and also a place of balance in the sense that, in addition to the sunset alignments … conceptually opposite sunrise alignments are also found.”52 These th
ey detail as follows:
Viewed from DP2, the summer solstice sun will rise over Mound C.
Viewed from DP2, the winter solstice sun will rise over Mound D. If in fact Mound D was constructed more than 2,000 years after the Poverty Point florescence, then the implication is that the people of the Coles Creek culture understood, incorporated, and further expanded upon the Poverty Point design for their own purposes.
Viewed from DP2, the equinox sun will rise in alignment with DP1.53
The overall achievement—the “seamless integration of site orientation, celestial alignments, bilateral symmetry of design points, internal geometry [and] regularities in mensuration”54—leads Romain and Davis to conclude that “Poverty Point was built according to a preconceived master plan … or design template … that integrated astronomical alignments, geometric shapes and local topography.”55
In their view, the question that begs to be answered is, “Why? Why was Poverty Point designed in such a way that it connects geometric earthen forms to celestial bodies and events at such a massive scale?”56
It’s an excellent question, but another should be asked first.
If there was a “preconceived master plan,” where did it come from?
CONTINUITY
America Before Page 27