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Episode 40-Ancient North America's First City
Welcome to our 40th episode. Join Shaner and Bob as they discuss Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana. Many archaeologists and scientists consider it as North America’s First City. It lies 15 miles west of the Mississippi River. At 1500 BCE, everywhere else in North America had small villages of about 100 residents, however, Poverty Point had between 4000 and 5000 residents. This was unprecedented at time.
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The size, scale, and organization of Poverty Point were unseen before in North America. Viewed from above, the city would have resembled an amphitheater. The semicircular embankments radiated from a 37-acre central plaza.
The main population of Poverty Point lived on top of the embankments in a very organized and densely clustered way. In the rest of North America, most people were still nomadic hunters and gatherers. Those that did live in villages built randomly arranged houses; their villages held no more than 100 people. Yet in Poverty Point, thousands of people were living in orderly rows of houses.
Carbon-14 dates from under the plaza come out to around 1800 BCE. The site’s mounds and living spaces were put in shortly after, improved over time, and were occupied until around 700 BCE. That means Poverty Point was a living city for over 1,000 years. To put that in context, the US has only been a country for 247 years, Poverty Point was a city 4 times longer.
A structure known as Mound A was by far the largest structure at the site, centrally located directly behind the concentric housing platforms. A pyramid, Mound A is 72 feet tall, 710 feet long, and 660 feet wide. That makes it the second largest pyramid in terms of volume built in ancient North America, north of Mesoamerica.
