Poverty Point Culture Timeline

Poverty Point

1700 BCE – 1100 BCE

A vast complex of concentric earthen ridges and massive mounds built around 1700 BCE by hunter-gatherers in what is now northeastern Louisiana — centuries before agriculture reached the region and more than a thousand years before the first Egyptian pyramids' contemporaries built anything comparable in North America. Poverty Point is the largest and most complex set of earthworks built anywhere in the Americas before 1000 BCE, built entirely by non-farming societies using only baskets of earth carried by hand.