Hunter-gatherers more sophisticated than once thought?
...
T.R. Kidder, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has been studying the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. The site, near the town of Epps, is one of the largest mound sites in North America. It is also one of the oldest.
It existed from 1,700-1,100 B.C. and the people who lived there were hunter-gatherers. The site is about three square kilometers and features a large earthen mound that is 72 feet tall and 700 feet long and wide. There are concentric ridges around the mound where Kidder theorizes people lived, given the evidence of disposed garbage.
Kidder and his team spent the summer excavating a dirt platform on one side of the large mound. According to his analysis of dirt layers and lack of erosion, the platform was constructed in a year or less.
"We believe they built this entire platform in a period so brief that there was no erosion of dirt taking place," Kidder says. "Also, there would have to be a pretty sizeable population to build a mound this size. It would have taken between seven and 10 million 55-pound baskets of dirt just to build the platform we examined. That's a lot of dirt. Even working all day long, it's not something 30 people could do in that kind of time frame."
The building of the mound also suggests a very high level of social and political organization, according to Kidder.
"I find it hard to imagine that you could keep labor going on that kind of scale without some kind of directed political organization," he says. "Someone had to figure out a mechanism for organizing the people and directing them."
Why did they go to all that trouble to build a dirt mound? "It's very interesting because there is nothing on top of the mound," Kidder says. "There were no houses, no factories, no garbage from people working. By default, it's hard not to think of it as being a ceremonial ritual building, though that's very speculative."
"I think we are able to demonstrate pretty categorically that this site, or at least the mound itself, which is one of the largest earthen mounds in North America, was built very quickly, presumably by a large number of people in a socially and politically organized fashion," Kidder says.
"That is really contradictory to the classic textbook definition of hunters and gatherers. For instance, if this mound was built in 1,200 A.D., it would certainly be a big site, but it wouldn't be that spectacular because, frankly, everyone else was doing it at that point. But the fact that these are hunter-gatherers in 1,700-1,100 B.C. makes it absolutely unique." ...
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
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