Poverty Point
How did a mobile hunter-gatherer society with no farming, no metal tools, no wheel, no draft animals, and no sign of kings or a coercive state organize enough people to move roughly a million cubic yards of earth, basket by basket, into the largest earthworks in North America — raising its greatest mound in under three months — and what was the whole complex for?
c. 1700-1100 BCE, Late Archaic period · Poverty Point, near Epps, West Carroll Parish, Louisiana, United StatesAdded July 2026