The Attacking Ocean by Brian Fagan

netted, or swim among them with duck decoys on their heads, then grab their unsuspecting prey by the feet from underwater. Back ashore, they preserve the birds by drying and soaking them in oil for later consumption. Storage was critical. Everyone living along the river had experienced food shortages caused by floods that could inundate wide tracts of the floodplain until as late as July.
    Between about 4500 and 4000 B.C.E., the Mississippi and its tributaries slowed as sea levels stabilized. Silt from the now more sluggish river accumulated. Backwater swamps and oxbows formed, which proved to be a paradise for hunters camped along their floodplains. Apart from waterfowl, they thrived off fish and mollusks, also plant foods, which abounded, especially the nut harvests of fall. So plentifulwere food supplies that many groups stayed in the same places for most, if not all, the year.
    By 2000 B.C.E., the Lower Mississippi had become a complex political and social world. Most people now lived in small base camps, but sometimes clustered around somewhat larger centers, connected to other groups by intricate ties of kin and volatile rivalries. The largest of these centers comes as somewhat of a surprise in a world of hamlets and temporary camps. The great horseshoe-shaped earthworks and mounds of Poverty Point lie on the Macon Ridge in the Mississippi floodplain, near the confluences of six rivers and twenty-five kilometers from the great river itself. Six concentric semicircular earthen ridges divided into segments lie about forty meters apart. Apparently houses lay atop the earthworks, which were about twenty-five meters wide and three meters high, elevated above the surrounding low-lying terrain. To the west, an earthen mound stands more nearly twenty meters high and two hundred meters long. Over five thousand cubic meters of basket-hefted soil went into the Poverty Point earthworks. 2

    Figure 13.2 The earthworks at Poverty Point, Louisiana. © Martin Pate.
    The concentric earthworks came into being in about 1650 B.C.E., surrounded by a network of lesser centers. Long-distance trade routes carrying exotic materials converged here, not only from upstream along the Mississippi, but also from the Arkansas, Red, Ohio, and Tennessee Rivers as well. Together, they formed the nexus of a vast exchange network that handled exotic rocks and minerals such as galena from more than ten sources in the Midwest and Southeast, some of them as far as a thousand kilometers away.
    Poverty Point is a huge enigma. How many people lived there? Was this a center where hundreds of visitors gathered for major ceremonies, perhaps on occasions such as the solstices? A person standing on the largest Poverty Point mound can sight the vernal and autumnal equinoxes directly across the center of the earthworks to the east. This is the point where the sun rises on the first days of spring and fall, but whether this was of ritual importance remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that Poverty Point was at the mercy of river floods and the vagaries of the Mississippi delta downstream.
    The great center lies near natural escarpments, close to floodplain swamps, oxbow lakes, and upland hunting grounds. Like societies up and down the major rivers nearby, Poverty Point people were hunters and plant gatherers. They also cultivated a number of native species, such as sunflowers, bottle gourds, and squashes. The floodplain landscapes and their environs produced more than enough food for considerable numbers of people to live permanently in places as large as Poverty Point, but we still know little about them, or of the leaders behind the centers, who must have organized the communal labor needed to erect earthworks and mounds. Poverty Point was a prophetic forerunner of much more elaborate chiefdoms that flourished along the Mississippi and its tributaries a thousand years later. But, after centuries of gradual population growth and extensive long-distance trade,