Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Poverty Point


Hubby, Mr. Hotdog and I took a road trip down to the steamy Mississippi Delta territory of southern Arkansas and Northern Louisiana. We feel compelled to take at least one educational roadtrip to a historic site each summer.

Most are just interesting for the day then quickly forgotten. Not so with Poverty Point. It gave me a *lot* of brain candy to chew on. They have lots of interesting puzzle pieces out there and not a lot of answers. It's like the culture developed time travel but forgot to invent the wheel. Yep, lots of questions still remain.

Journaling:

Poverty Point in Epps, Louisiana is a massive pre-historic earthworks site dating to around 1500 BC. The advanced society who lived here were primarily hunter-gatherers. No evidence of domesticated crops have been found. That's amazing since it is estimated that over 1,000 people occupied this site at any given time.

Highly decorated clay objects have been found as well as intricate stone carvings, yet no trace of pottery has been uncovered.

It seems that a people with the engineering skills to design and build this site would figure out to put a thumbprint into a clay ball and keep going, turning it into a bowl...doncha think?

2 comments:

Timaree said...

You would think! But maybe they made baskets that deteriorated over time or some unique thing it would have been nice to know about now. Time erases so many things. I always wonder what people will say a thousand years from now about us.

Speck said...

Probably that we were a primitive people because we left nothing in stone. All our steel, concrete, brick and wood structures will deteriorate quickly (relatively).

And what trace of the Internet will be left? What will some future archeologist think when they find my non-green, non-eco-friendly, non-biodegradable Microsoft mouse? Will they think it some religious icon? Well, they may be close on that one; bad example.

Skittles, which I'm sure are made from recycled tires, will blow their little minds. Maybe they'll tag those as game pieces or some form of currency.