Southwest Ridges

Farming and erosion have worn the southwest ridges down to about 2 feet, though they may have stood 5 feet when built some 3,000 years ago. This sector turned up unfinished beads, pendants and blades, and broken tools that were reworked. A low aisle separating it from the west sector lines up with the winter solstice sunset seen from the plaza's center. Whether that was intended is argued. James Haag, who excavated in the 1970s, tied the aisles to solstices; Robert Purrington holds that the layout is geometric, not astronomical, and the two chose different centers.

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
• Poverty Point Artifacts — steps away
• Mound A — 0.2 mi
• Mound C — 0.2 mi