Short stops: Poverty Point World Heritage Site

Top of Mound A

Mound A

Any rise in the terrain across Louisiana's flat terrain gets felt immediately.

For more than three millennia, Louisiana’s tallest manmade point sat on an isolated bayou, concealing an advanced culture’s works. 

After driving across the Bayou State, which any number of lakes and rivers rising up, I expect Indian mounds would not be hard to spot. Small skylines announced Shreveport then Monroe, the architecture hinting that the prosperity leading to their construction was not recent. I was not disappointed. In the trees, I spotted a significant hill. In land this flat, the hill had to be manmade. 

First, I had to pass the visitor center to learn a bit more about Poverty Point. A jovial Louisiana state park ranger regaled me with all sorts of Poverty Point history. Poverty Point lies on Bayou Macon, a few dozen miles from the Mississippi River. 

There are Indian mounds all over North America, but few as old as these. Numerous mounds date throughout the last millennia, but not those at Poverty Point. 

 Mound A at Poverty Point is the nation’s second-largest Indian mound after the Cahokia Mound in Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Mound A and the Poverty Point society date back to 1,600 B.C.-1,100 B.C., with the site abandoned almost 2,000 years before the heyday of Cahokia. Put another way, the Poverty Point culture thrived at the same time as the Mycenaeans, the early Greeks. 

Despite its age, archaeologists have figured out that Mound A was constructed in as few as 90 days, with 5,000 people contributing to its construction. This is due to the lack of erosion from rainfall and growth in vegetation on the mound. 

These days, a series of light grasses covers Mound A and a short trail leads to the top. The mound barely crests above the pine stands that surround it, but this qualified as a high point in Louisiana. The other two mounds are much shorter. A series of ridges surround the mounds, where people would have lived. These residents were hunter-gatherers, but upend our view of hunter-gatherers as nomads. Archaeologists have found all manners of carved figures at the site, including signs of widespread North American trade. 

The empty continent theory gets exposed as fraud pretty quickly when these pre-Columbian cultures show signs of trade with modern-day Mexico and copper mined in Michigan, neither a stone’s throw from northeast Louisiana. But our view of the Poverty Pointy culture could get upended again. Only 1 percent of the site has been excavated, leaving ample room for new discoveries into North American life 3,000 years ago. 

 I found myself alone on the drive among the mounds. Wildlife was sparse among the mound lands, although the more I stood and observed, the more birds of such a watery place began to emerge. Great blue herons were abound, and I spotted a number of egrets and other uncommon water birds. 

The people of Poverty Point vanished as western civilization in Greece sprouted. These people lived a different way, thriving millenia before the better-known mound building societies to come. 

As I looked at these isolated mounds, I kept wondering if their mounds and ridges held lessons that we had not reached yet.