Poverty Point Culture Essays - Mound Builders,

Poverty Point Culture Poverty Point sites in Louisiana and western Mississippi exhibit the first major residential settlements and monumental earthworks in the United States. Although the Poverty Point culture is not well understood in terms of social organization, it was involved in the transportation of nonlocal raw materials (for example, shell, stone, and copper) from throughout the eastern United States into the lower Mississippi River Valley to selected sites where the materials were worked into finished products and then traded. While specific information on Poverty Point subsistence, trade mechanisms, and other cultural aspects is still speculative, the sites nevertheless exhibit specific material culture, such as baked clay objects, magnetite plummets, steatite bowls, red-jasper lapidary work, fiber-tempered pottery, and microlithic stone tools. By around 500 B.C., the Poverty Point culture was replaced by the Tchula/Tchefuncte Early Woodland culture, which existed in western Tennessee, Louisiana, southern Arkansas, western Mississippi, and coastal Alabama. The sites of this lower Mississippi River Valley culture were small village settlements. Subsistence continued to consist of intensive collecting of wild plants and animals, as with the preceding Poverty Point culture, but for the first time quantities of pottery were produced. There appears to be a de-emphasis on long-distance trade and manufacture of lithic artwork noted in the earlier Poverty Point culture. The Tchula/Tchefuncte Early Woodland culture appears to have coexisted with some Middle Woodland cultures in the lower Mississippi River Valley. The pottery of this period appears to have been relatively crude and undecorated. The pottery is distinctive in being thick, poorly fired and covered on the inside and outside by cord marking. This cord marking was probably the result of construction techniques in which clay was formed around a basket or bag before firing. Not all Early Woodland sites had pottery and some researchers suggest that it was used only for part of the year, perhaps during the processing of acorns or other nuts for their oil. During this time period burials became even more elaborate with increased inclusion of status artifacts. Some of these exotic artifacts show clear evidence of influence and contact with even more elaborate and complex cultural groups to the south. In these areas, clearly complex and stratified societies, probably with full time chiefs and priests, had developed and were interacting with many other widely distributed groups across North America. Exchange of exotic desirable goods such as copper, silver, obsidian, sea shells and exotic, often colourful, cherts seems to have been the main goal of this interaction sphere but, undoubtedly, the exchange of ideas was also important in stimulating further development. Whether foods or furs for clothing was also exchanged is unknown at this time. The main characteristic, besides elaboration of burial practices, that distinguished the Early and Middle Woodland from Late Archaic traditions, was the gradual intensification of local and interregional exchange of exotic materials. For many years archeologists have regarded as classic those Middle Woodland sites with elaborate ceremonial earthworks that contained the burial mound graves of elite individuals buried with exotic mortuary gifts obtained through an extensive trade network covering most of the eastern United States. Because of the similarity of earthworks and burial goods found at widely scattered sites in the Southeast and the area north of the Ohio River, it was assumed that a cultural continuity-sometimes referred to as the Hopewellian Interaction Sphere-existed throughout much of the eastern United States. At least some nonorganic trade items can be identified from the study of the burial mounds of the Middle Woodland. To this trade, the Middle Woodland territories of the Southeast appear to have provided mica, quartz crystals, and chlorite from the Carolinas, and a variety of marine shells, as well as shark and alligator teeth, from the Florida Gulf Coast. In exchange, the Middle Woodland clans of the Southeast received galena from Missouri, flint from Illinois, grizzly bear teeth, obsidian and chalcedony from the Rockies, and copper from the Great Lakes. Standardization of style for the finished artifacts used in this trade may be attributed to a relatively small number of clan leaders controlling the exchange system and developing their own symbolic artifact language of what trade goods constituted a reciprocal exchange between clans. The Middle Woodland (200 - 300 B.C. to A.D. 700 - 900) period is distinguished from the Early Woodland only in few, relatively minor, aspects. These relate to some aspects of the chipped lithic tool inventory (i.e. changes in projectile point types) and the addition of decoration of increasing elaboration