Answers To Go with Susan Smith
San Marcos Public Library
625 E. Hopkins St.
512-393-8200
Q. I have been reading the historical fiction
books in the First North Americans series by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear. “People of the Owl” is set at Poverty Point. Do you have a non-fiction book on Poverty Point?
A. I searched our online catalog and found Paul Schneider’s “Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History.” Schneider included a chapter on Poverty Point with four other chapters on earth mounds built before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
Poverty Point is a U.S. National Monument/UNESCO World Heritage Site in northeastern Louisiana.
The Gears begin “People of the Owl” with several pages of background information. Here is an excerpt from that introduction: “Ask any American to name the oldest city in the United States and he might tell you St. Augustine, Florida (A.D. 1565). Among an enlightened few, the name Old Oraibi (A.D. 1240), in the Hopi Mesas, might pop up.
“But, with apologies to both of these places, we wish to point out that North America’s oldest city was not located in Florida — or even in the Southwest — nor was it built around St. Louis, or in the fertile valleys of Ohio
“Rather, to find it, you must journey to northeastern Louisiana, just outside of the small town of Epps. There, under the superb management of the state of Louisiana, you can still walk the stunning earthworks of Poverty Point, North America’s first true city.
“The site itself is huge. From Lower Jackson Mound on the south to Motley Mound on the north is a little over five miles. The main earthworks cover more than four hundred acres… In sheer size it would remain unmatched for another fifteen hundred years.
“So, what explains this spectacular thirty-five-hundredyear-old cultural florescence?
“The answer seems to lie in the richness of the Lower Mississippi Valley and its yearly floods. The people at Poverty Point ate everything that walked, crawled, swam, burrowed and grew in their benevolent foodrich environment.
“In short, the Lower Mississippi Valley provided the surplus in resources that allowed remarkable cultural achievements.”
The Louisiana State Park system website offers additional information: “The time was eight centuries after Egyptian laborers dragged huge stones across the desert to build the Great Pyramids, and before the great Mayan pyramids were constructed… The people were a sophisticated group who left behind one of the most important archaeological sites in North America.
“The Poverty Point inhabitants set for themselves an enormous task as they built a complex array of earthen mounds and ridges overlooking the Mississippi River flood plain. The central construction consists of six rows of concentric ridges, parts of which were as high as five feet. The diameter of the outermost ridge measures nearly three-quarters of a mile.
“Poverty Point is indeed a rare remnant of an exceptional culture. It has been estimated that landscape preparation and earthworks construction may have required moving as many as 53 million cubic feet of soil. Considering that a cubic foot of soil weighs 75-100 pounds, and that the laborers carried this dirt in roughly 50-pound basket loads, it is obvious that this was a great communal engineering feat.
“Poverty Point's inhabitants imported stone and ore over great distances. Projectile points and other stone tools found at Poverty Point were made from raw materials which originated in the Ouachita and Ozark Mountains and in the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys. Soapstone for vessels came from the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama and Georgia. Other materials came from distant places in the eastern United States. The extensive trade network attests to the complex and sophisticated society that built the Poverty Point earthworks.
“Dated between 1700 and 1100 B.C., this site is unique among archaeological sites on this continent.”
This question was inspired by the curiosity of a reader who appreciated the research that Kathleen and Michael Gear put into their First North Americans series. These titles are richly-detailed, fast-paced, and suspenseful. At present, I believe there are 17 books in the series. The first is “People of the Wolf.”
