Heading from
Natchitoches we headed North East toward the top corner of Louisiana and a
place called Poverty Point. The UNESCO listed World Heritage site contains some
of the largest prehistoric earth works in North America dating back some
3000 years. A 500 acre semi-circular city and the centre of an enormous trading
network that stretched hundreds of miles, Poverty Point is one of the most
significant archaeological sites in North America.
The city surrounds
a huge plaza area that once contained circles of upright logs. There are six
concentric, crescent ridge earthworks, where people lived and worked,
with several large earth mounds, including one 70 foot high mound that is
approx 238000 cubic meters of fill.
Poverty
Point was abandoned around 1100 B.C. A more recent native group added another
mound in about A.D. 700, but occupied only a small fraction of the site, and
only for a brief period. Aside from that, there was only intermittent human use
of the site for 2,900 years, until the settlers arrived in the area in the
1800s. At that time the site was used as farmland and the regular ploughing
obliterated many of the features of the site.
The museum
was interesting, with the artifacts that have been collected from the site. We
opted for a self guided walking tour, around 4 km, that took us allover the site,
including climbing the big mound.
Following
Poverty Point we headed East, over the state border into Mississippi and
Vicksburg.
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