Lee Arco
     Geoarchaeology at Jaketown

Toward the end of the Archaic Period in eastern North America (approximately 3800-3000 years ago), earthen mound construction, extensive long-distance trade, technological developments, and elaboration of lapidary arts reached unprecedented scales among the hunter-gatherers of the Poverty Point culture, centered on the Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana. Research at the site has helped reveal the extremely high degree of organizational complexity attainable by hunter-gatherer societies and expanded our conceptions of the variable social and economic configurations expressed by groups that rely on hunting, fishing, and collecting for their subsistence.

Jaketown is the second largest extant Poverty Point settlement and provides the foundation to our understanding of the Late Archaic culture in the Yazoo Basin of Mississippi. The current geoarchaeological research at Jaketown seeks to fill some of the gaps in our current knowledge of the site, providing a first step toward expanding our regional understanding of Poverty Point society and broadening our insight into this unique hunter-gatherer phenomenon in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Excavation and soil/sediment coring has been conducted at the site to examine the chronology of Poverty Point occupation and the age of previously uninvestigated mounds at the site. The stratigraphy of the site is also being examined to help reconstruct changes in the site’s landscape and the environmental setting during different phases of prehistoric human occupation. Recent studies in the Tensas Basin of northeast Louisiana have identified evidence of catastrophic flooding and large-scale changes in the Mississippi River system between 3000 and 2500 years ago, which are thought to be implicated in the dissolution of the Poverty Point culture approximately 3000 years before the present. These events are also believed to be linked to a 500-year gap in occupation within many areas of the Lower Mississippi Valley and to the pronounced cultural differences between the Poverty Point and the succeeding Early Woodland inhabitants of the region. Through evaluating archaeological and environmental data sets from Jaketown, we hope to examine the regional extent/impact of these flood episodes and provide a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of the degree to which human behavior was influenced and/or structured/constrained by the dynamic alluvial environment of the Lower Mississippi Valley.