Poverty Point Artifacts

There is no natural stone at Poverty Point, so almost everything cut or carved there arrived by trade. Stone for projectile points came from the Ouachita and Ozark mountains and the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, soapstone for vessels from Alabama and Georgia, and galena from Missouri and Iowa. Copper once assumed to come from the Great Lakes has been traced to the southern Appalachians. The commonest objects are small baked loess pieces that archaeologists think were heat-holding cooking aids used in earth ovens. Little pottery was made, and acidic soil destroyed bone and wood.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — steps away
  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

• After Poverty Point — steps away
• Mound C — steps away
• Southwest Ridges — steps away
• Mound A — 0.3 mi