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The Poverty Point site, located in northeast Louisiana, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June 2014. For the uninitiated, Poverty Point is a monumental earthworks site built by hunter-fisher-gatherers some 3400 years ago. The site’s design, with six mounds and six C-shaped ridges that define an interior plaza, is unique in the world and its scale is unprecedented for its time and place. While most archaeological investigations have focused on the mounds and ridges, a combination of geophysical survey, targeted excavation, and soil cores is revealing new insight into the plaza, an underappreciated feature of the landscape. |
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Diana Greenlee received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2002. She is currently the Station Archaeologist at the Poverty Point World Heritage Site and an Adjunct Professor of Archaeology in the School of Sciences at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Since arriving in Louisiana in 2006, Diana has collaborated with other archaeologists to study the Poverty Point landscape and to investigate resource use among this community of indigenous hunter-fisher-gatherers. Diana led the effort to prepare Poverty Point’s World Heritage nomination and coauthored Poverty Point: Revealing the Forgotten City with photographer Jenny Ellerbe. |
M.A.R.I. Lunch Talks feature guest speakers on Mesoamerican archaeology, history, and ethnography, as well as comparative topics from other world areas. Seminars are typically held on Fridays at noon in English or Spanish.
