Additional notes on the Poverty Point Site in Northern Louisiana

Abstract

The two large mounds at the Poverty Point and Motley sites in West Carrol Parish, Louisiana, were first adequately described by C. B. Moore (1913, Fig. 29), and for a long while these structures and the cultural remains scattered about them remained one of the principal puzzles in the archaeology of the lower Mississippi Valley. Clarence Webb has made extensive surface collections from this locality for a number of years and his three articles in American Antiquity, the last written with Haag, form the bulk of the information which we have on the culture (Webb, 1944, 1948; Haag and Webb, 1953). The purpose of the present brief note is to report some newly discovered facets of the Poverty Point cultural complex.The writer was able to work a few weeks at the site in the spring of 1952 and again in 1953. However, the most remarkable discovery was not made in the field but in the Cartographic Laboratory of the Mississippi River Commission in Vicksburg.