Poverty Point

Long before the pyramids of Mexico's great cities, hunter-gatherers in northeastern Louisiana built one of the largest earthwork complexes in the world. Poverty Point, raised roughly between 1700 and 1100 BCE, is a set of six C-shaped ridges nested around a central plaza, the outermost about three-quarters of a mile across. Its builders were not farmers, which makes the scale of the work remarkable: they moved earth by the basketload to shape an enormous ceremonial and trading center on a bluff above the Mississippi floodplain.

Mound A, the site's largest, stands about 72 feet (22 m) high and holds some 8.4 million cubic feet of earth, and studies suggest it was raised in a matter of months. Stone, copper, galena and soapstone found here came from as far away as the Appalachians, the Ozarks and the upper Mississippi, evidence of a trade network spanning much of the continent. Poverty Point became a national monument in 1988 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014. It is operated as a Louisiana state historic site.

• Louisiana
  The Pelican State, where the Mississippi meets the Gulf located in
• The Mississippi River
  The great river that drains the American heartland near
• Cahokia Mounds
  The largest city in North America north of Mexico, around 1100 related
• Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
  Giant geometric earthworks in Ohio, aligned to the moon related