Leslie and David's Wanderings: 16 March 2022 Poverty Point National Monument

David work yesterday morning and did income taxes in the afternoon. It was raining yesterday so we really would not have been out and about. Today we drove north to the Poverty Point National Monument, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site is named after the Plantation which previously was on the location. We first went to the visitor center/museum to pay the entrance fee for Leslie ($4). David did not have to pay a fee since he is 62 and over! Welcome to Senior Citizenship! We watched the park movie about the site and explored the exhibits. The site contains 4 major mounds and 6 C shaped ridges that were built between 1800 and 1100 BC. There are over 1000 Indian mounds in Louisiana but these are the largest in the country for this period. Archeologist estimate the builders moved over 100 million basket loads of soil to build the expansive central court yard, the three mounds and the 6 C shaped rings that are perfectly centered with the courtyard. Mound A is the largest mound raised during this time period (it would not be surpassed for 2000 years). This site was the epic center of an enormous trading network and would have been the New York city of its time. The trading network extended from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian Border, and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. Although not located directly on the Mississippi River, during that period, it was only a 6 mile journey down the Bayou.

We walked the 2.8 mile World Heritage trail. From ground level, its hard to picture the 6 ridges after 3000 years of erosion and 100 years of being plowed. They leave the grass longer on the tops of the ridges to help you visualize the ridge locations. They once were 6-9 feet above the swales in between but today are barely 3 feet. One mound on the site was built by the Cold Creek society over 1500 years after the site had been abandoned and two of the original Euromerican settlers are buried on the top of this mound. Mounds B and C are hard to visualize but Mound A is very distinctive. It is theorized that it was built to resemble a bird in flight. The view from the top of Mound A helps you visualize how large the site is and how organized the society had to be. We spent about 3 hours in the park and saw everything there was to see.

For a Work Heritage Site, we were pretty disappointed in how the site is maintained. The park is run by the state of Louisiana (it was a state park before it was named a National Monument). But it definitely needs a lot of maintenance.

When we returned to the state park, we hiked some of the trails in the state park with Etta, but found them wet and muddy from the rains the previous days.