Mound B

Mound B was the first earthwork raised at Poverty Point, after 1700 BCE by one reckoning and about 1600 BCE by another. It grew in stages to about 21 feet tall and 180 feet across. Excavations in 1952, 1953 and 1955, led by James Ford and Clarence Webb, found charcoal, fire pits, possible postmolds, and the impressions of woven baskets in the fill, which show how the soil was carried. The 1955 digging also altered the mound's original conical shape. Its purpose is still under study.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 0.5 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 17 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 18 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 22 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.

More markers nearby

• Mound A — 0.4 mi
• Mound C — 0.4 mi
• Southwest Ridges — 0.5 mi
• After Poverty Point — 0.5 mi