Ancient lessons from Poverty Point, Louisiana

Welfare of the group over the individual

    Wikipedia tells us, “The Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (or Samaria) and Judah first appear in the 9th century BCE.” That makes the Jewish religion 3,000 years old. In the northeast corner of Louisiana, Poverty Point is older than that, and the religion practiced at Poverty Point was 2,000 years older than that. What I’m saying is the religion of the first peoples of the New World is the oldest religion on Earth. As a matter of fact and by the way, it is still being practiced today.

    The earthworks of Watson Brake,  Louisiana date from around 4,000 BCE, in other words 6,000 years ago. The hunter/gathers of that pre-agricultural time came together at Watson Brake to create a temple to God and since there is (ultimately) only one God he/she/it is the same One every other religion worships. We just did it here first in an organized way verifiable by the oldest earthwork mound complex in at least North America.

    Watson Brake is older than both Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. It was built as a purely spiritual experience. The building of it was the religion in action, what the Hindus might call karma yoga.  Mounds were a way of building a bridge between Earth and the cosmos. They were a symbol of creation itself and a “permanent showcase of community pride and identity.”

    Poverty Point, which is 3,400 years old (though at least one mound is a thousand years older than that) was constructed as a spiritual center which housed local inhabitants. About a dozen Watson Brakes could fit inside its outer ring. It was also one of the first major trading centers in the New World. Watson Brake shows no signs of foreign materials being imported. Poverty Point’s trade network reached from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Gulf Coast, from the Rocky Mountains to the eastern slope of the Appalachians. It successfully practiced trade and religion and carried on a peaceful society for over a thousand years. Do you think we might learn anything from that?

    According to Jon L. Gibson, an archeologist who spent most of his life studying Poverty Point, “I contend that the large-scale adoption of a general benevolent attitude was the bottom line of Poverty Point’s political economy.” The secret of their success besides being the original good guys, was that they set up their political economy using a networking strategy. According to JLG this “emphasized individual-centered exchange relationships” among the groups with whom they traded.

    In his book The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point, from which these other quotes were taken, Gibson wrote, “The sheer volume of foreign exchange suggests that Poverty Point had embraced a network strategy.” A thousand years of trading tends to amount to a large volume of trade goods. Imagine a thousand years of peaceful exchange where language influences from the northern Algonquin mingles with the current derivations of the ancient Gulf to create a new, broader language of trade and religion. The religion first displayed at Watsons Brake would have been in development for over two thousand years when the people of Poverty Point felt the urge to display it again in six tangible rings in the center of a 25-mile core.

    In Gibson’s view, “Ego and position were subordinated by a cooperative spirit, which rose to the front because stone resources were lacking.” There was no stone on Maçon Ridge where Poverty Point was built. It had to be imported and that demanded they build an extensive trade network. “Persuasion, not coercion, was the basis for group action among simple and midlevel hunter-gatherer communities.” We live n a world where persuasion moves us as well, but our persuasion comes in the form of advertisements, mostly television ads, which try their best to whip us into a buying frenzy. Poverty Point’s persuaders did their work face to face, a good lesson for all of us.

    As is this: “Poverty Point was a case of a logistically mobile fisher-hunter-gatherer community corporately bound together, a community where egos were not allowed to get in the way of group welfare and everyone worked toward making the good life available to all.” When Gibson speaks of a community “corporately bound together” he refers to a political economy of hunter-gather societies Richard Blanton and associates called a corporate strategy which “emphasized welfare of the group as a whole and discouraged vainglorious behavior.”

    Poverty Point did have people who could be called elite; that’s because so much raw material had to be imported. This meant somebody profited. “In my view, what kept competition from being disruptive was the likelihood that lineages did not compete directly but vied with some ideal standard of living.”

    In our dog-eat-dog world competition underlies almost everything we do, from work to sport to religion. Creating our local world so that we strive for an ideal standard of living would bend our competitive spirit towards the common good. An important building block of that ideal standard of living is cooperation. Replacing competition with cooperation would go a long way to create the dynamic equilibrium balance we need to survive in the post-industrial, Computer ruled world of the day after tomorrow.