Tristram R. Kidder, of Washington University in St. Louis, will present "Poverty Point as a Radical, Cosmological Ritual Intervention."

Abstract: Drawing almost exclusively from Western concepts of social change, hunter-gatherer complexity is viewed as an outcome of unequal wealth accumulation and its generational perpetuation achieved by rational, self-interested actors using various strategies to advance their interests and who, over time, institutionalize social relationships that reward their efforts. In eastern North America, archaeological research in the last two decades has expanded our understanding of hunter gatherer complexity; political and economic variability is now widely recognized, and scholarly awareness of rich, complicated and historically variable social patterns has developed. The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts about Poverty Point arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built to express political and economic power by a limited group of people over hundreds of years, our data suggests the deliberately planned earthworks were built rapidly over an exceptionally brief span of months to perhaps a year by a large voluntary labor force drawn from across eastern North America. We hypothesize that Poverty Point was not a politically or economically important Great Town but a place of revelation; the construction of the earthworks was a radical, cosmological ritual intervention, spurred by perceptible climate and environmental changes across the Southeast after 3300 cal BP. The earthworks at PP are among the materialized remains of ritual performances intentionally initiated by Indigenous people seeking to rebalance an unbalanced world.