Free Republic

It had been previously thought that the Poverty Point earthworks in northeastern Louisiana were inhabited some 3,500 years ago by a complex, hierarchical society ruled as a chiefdom, but traces of long-term dwellings and burials have not been uncovered at the site. According to a statement released by Washington University in St. Louis, archaeologists T.R. Kidder, Olivia Baumgartel, and Seth Grooms suggest that Poverty Point was used as a meeting place by egalitarian hunter-gatherers who lived all over the Southeast and the Midwest. “When these earthworks were being constructed, the Southeast was prone to severe weather and massive floods,” Kidder...

...That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive,...