Poverty Point became a World Heritage Site in 2014. That honor goes only to the most exceptional places around the world. Built by American Indians 3,400 years ago, Poverty Point is unlike any other site. Its design, with multiple mounds and C-shaped ridges, is not found anywhere else. In its time, it had the largest earthworks in the Western Hemisphere. Many people lived, worked, and held special events at this huge site over hundreds of years. This has led some to call it North America’s first city.
Archaeologists have found out that this community achieved things once thought impossible in its day and age. For example, it was at the heart of a huge trade network, the largest in North America at that time. The trade and site design are more unusual because the people did not grow crops or raise animals for food. No other hunting and gathering society made mounds at this scale anywhere else in the world. Now it is your turn to discover more about this one-of-a-kind site!
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American Indians made the site’s first mounds around 1700 B.C., during the Late Archaic period. This started an earthwork tradition at the site that lasted for about 600 years. That amounts to what we would think of today as nearly 25 generations. In that time, people moved nearly 2 million cubic yards of earth to make the site. Assuming a large dump truck can haul 52 cubic yards of earth, it would have taken about 38,462 dump truck loads of dirt to make Poverty Point!
even though
has some goofy clips his books are top notch history lessons. Dawn of Everything has a good bit of info on a bunch of ancient american societies. There’s one bit in the book about (i might be mixing them up) Salmon-rich proto-communists living next door to a slave society in the PNW
I thought the salmon people were the raiders and the acorn (???) People were the more typically peaceful ones. It’s been a while. Debt is a much more cohesive book IMO
you might be totally correct. I also read Debt & bullshit jobs. Debt is one of those books where one of the revelations appears so obvious: that credit was the first mass money system. Bc even american history class teaches about clay tablets and ancient systems of bookkeeping. History is also a bit on the nose where physical money is literally formed into a system of currency because of minor and major lords waging war across europe and force the unrelated peoples to trade with their armies.