Poverty Point: A Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley

EVERYDAY TOOLS

Hunting and collecting were basic to Poverty Point economy everywhere, and rather specialized equipment was designed to aid in these food quests. The bow and arrow was unknown. The javelin was the main hunting device. These throwing spears were tipped with a variety of stone points. Some points, like the ones illustrated in Figure 5, were exclusive Poverty Point styles, but many were forms which had been made for hundreds, even thousands, of years before.

Figure 5. Javelin Points. a-b, Motley; c-d, f, Epps; e, Pontchartrain. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.

Casting distance and power were increased by the use of atlatls, or spear-throwers. Shaped like oversized crochet needles, atlatls were held in the throwing hand with the hooked end inserted into a shallow socket in the butt of the spear (Figure 6). Hurled with a smooth, gliding motion, the javelin was released toward the target while the atlatl remained in the hand.

Atlatl hooks were sometimes made of carved antler (Webb 1977, Figure 26), and polished stone weights supposedly were attached to the wooden handles. These atlatl weights came in a variety of sizes and shapes, including rectangular, diamond, oval, and boat-shaped bars and a host of unusual forms (Figure 7). Some were quite elaborate with lustrous finishes and engraved decorations. Repair holes reveal their value to owners.

Figure 6. Throwing a Javelin with an Atlatl. Closeup Shows How Atlatl Hook Is Attached to End of Spear.

Figure 7. Atlatl Weights. a-c, e, Gorgets; d, Triangular Tablet with Cross-Hatched Decoration; f-g, Narrow-Ended, Rectangular Tablets. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.

The hunter also used plummets (Figure 8). These objects were ground from heavy lumps of magnetite, hematite, limonite, and occasionally other stones. Shaped like plumb bobs or big teardrops, they often had encircling grooves or drilled holes in the small end. Several explanations of their function have been suggested, but the idea that they were bola weights seems most likely.

Figure 8. Hematite Plummets. a-d, Perforated Variety; e-g, Grooved Variety. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.

Other kinds of hunting equipment, such as nets, snares, traps, etc., were probably used by Poverty Point hunters, but because they were made of materials that decay easily, their use can only be determined because the bones of nocturnal animals occur among food remains. The presence of fishbones, ranging from tiny minnows to giant gar, implies that fishermen used some sort of device or technique for mass catches. None of the fishing equipment, known from contemporary villages like Bayou Jasmine near Lake Pontchartrain (Duhe 1976), has been recognized at Poverty Point villages.

We know that men and women must have used other tools to obtain food, but we are unable to say which of the many other chipped and ground items were used in this way. Gathering plant foods such as nuts, acorns, seeds, fruits, berries, greens, and “vegetables” probably did not require implements, other than what may have been handy. Digging tubers would have required some sort of device, but it need not have been anything other than a convenient pointed stick. However, hoe-like tools have been found at several Poverty Point villages and in abundance at Terral Lewis, a small hamlet about 10 miles southeast of Poverty Point. Some of these objects have coatings which look like melted glass. The coatings are fused opal, produced when the “hoes” cut through sod. These artifacts might have been real hoes used to till gardens, but in view of the total absence of domesticated plant remains from Poverty Point sites, this function remains unconfirmed.

Foods were prepared with a variety of implements. Meat could have been cut up with the aid of heavy chipped bifaces (“cleavers”) and sharp flakes or blades (“knives”). Battered rocks, pitted stones, and mortars might have served to pound nuts, acorns, and seeds into flour and oil (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Ground Stone Tools. a-b, Abraders; c, Pitted Stone; d, Mortar. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.

Cooking was done over hearths and in earth ovens. The earth oven was an ingenious Poverty Point invention. Nothing more than a hole in the ground to which hot baked clay objects were added, the earth oven was an efficient heat-regulating and energy-conserving facility. Small objects of baked clay were used to heat these baking pits (Figure 10). These little objects were hand molded. Fingers, palms, and sometimes tools were used to fashion dozens of different styles. These objects are a distinguishing hallmark of Poverty Point culture. So common are they that archaeologists refer to them as Poverty Point objects.

Figure 10. Baked Clay Heating Objects. a, Cylindrical; b-c, Cross-Grooved; d, Biconical Grooved; e, Biconical Plain; f, Melon-Shaped. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.

Modern experiments in earth oven cooking have been conducted (Hunter 1975; Gibson 1975). It was discovered through these experiments that the shapes of clay objects used determined the intensity and duration of temperatures inside the pits. This might have been a way of regulating cooking conditions, just like setting the time and power level in modern microwave ovens. Another important aspect of earth oven cooking is that it would have conserved firewood, which must have been a precious commodity around long-occupied villages.

Like modern Americans, Poverty Point peoples had a variety of vessels and contraptions for cooking, storage, and simple containment. They used vessels—pots and bowls—made of stone and baked clay. Stone vessels were chiseled out of soft sandstone and steatite (a dense, soft rock). Most stone vessels were plain but a few had decorations. Holes drilled near cracks show that these vessels were often repaired. Steatite was imported by the tons to the Poverty Point site from quarries in northern Georgia and Alabama (Webb 1944, 1977).

The Poverty Point pottery vessels mark the initial appearance of this kind of container in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Although not abundant, their presence has been accorded great historical significance by archaeologists. One archaeologist even argued that the art of making pottery was learned from Indians in South or Central America or through intermediaries along the Atlantic and eastern Gulf coasts. This view is very controversial. Other archaeologists prefer to think that ceramics, whatever their origin, were made by later people and that their appearance in Poverty Point garbage deposits was due to subsequent disturbances which churned and mixed earlier and later remains. And then there are other archaeologists who contend that Poverty Point people developed and made pottery largely on their own.

The extreme differences in pottery throughout the various Poverty Point territories support the latter view. In order to prevent cracking, some Poverty Point potters added vegetable fibers to the clay; others put sand and grit, bone particles, and hard lumps of clay; others added nothing. Decorations do seem to have followed rather universal styles, but each group of potters seems to have modified them to suit local tastes and to have added new features of their own.

Many other tools were used in everyday tasks of building houses, butchering animals and making other tools. We know Poverty Point peoples used stone tools for these jobs and probably also used wood, bone and antler ones, as well. Most of these were very similar to those used by earlier people.

Items such as hammerstones, whetstones, polishers, and others, were used mainly in a natural condition and required little or no preparation themselves. The characteristic shapes and signs of alteration that permit them to be recognized today got there through use and not intentional design.

Other tools were carefully shaped. Gouges, adzes, axes, and drills fall into this category. The objects were chipped from large pieces of gravel or big flakes into desired shapes. Often polish or tiny grooves appear on the working edges of these tools, which leads us to suspect that they were used to chop and carve wood, dig holes, and drill substances.

Some of these items, especially celts and adzes (cutting tools with the blades set at right angles to the handles), have counterparts of ground and polished stone. These smoothed objects were made by chipping, battering, grinding, and polishing in combination or singly. Whether these more elaborate forms were used like their chipped varieties is difficult to say, but they probably were.

There is another group of chipped stone artifacts which is one of the most abundant tool classes at the Poverty Point and Jaketown sites and which occurs in respectable numbers at many Poverty Point villages (Webb 1977:42). These mysterious objects are called microliths. The most common form has been dubbed a Jaketown perforator (Haag and Webb 1953: Ford and Webb 1956). Typically, perforators are tiny artifacts, made from blades and flakes; they have one bulbous end and a narrow point. They were originally presumed to be drills or punches, but experiments showed that they could have been worn-out scrapers, resulting from whittling antler, bone, and perhaps wood (Ford and Webb 1956:77). Their abundance at Poverty Point and Jaketown suggests a rather commonplace function, and perhaps the experimental results have been rightly interpreted. Recently, however, an archaeologist made a revealing discovery. He noticed an obstruction in the bottom of an unfinished hole that was drilled in the center of a narrow-ended, rectangular stone tablet. Using a straight pin, he dislodged a small flint object. It was the broken end of a Jaketown perforator; so perhaps, they were used as drills after all!

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