Petrographic thin-section analysis of poverty point pottery

Poverty Point (16WC5), located in West Carroll Parish, Louisiana, is famous for many things, including its earthen architecture, stone artifacts, and longdistance trade. The people who built and occupied Poverty Point are not, however, renowned for their pottery vessel technology, despite being contemporary with and clearly trading with people along the Atlantic and eastern Gulf Coast regions who were producing and using pottery vessels as a regular part of their food cooking technology. Ford and Webb (1956:105- 106) recognized that pottery, notably fiber-tempered ware, was an "integral" element of Poverty Point technology. Webb (1982:40-42) further noted that both fiber-tempered and temperless pottery were present at Poverty Point, Claiborne (22HA501) in southern Mississippi, and other Poverty Point sites (Bruseth 1991). These investigators, however, clearly did not feel that pottery was a significant element of Poverty Point technology, and vessel pottery was subsequently not emphasized in most discussions of the site and the culture. The pottery found at Poverty Point was typically attributed to later cultures, primarily the Early Woodland Tchefuncte culture, or to foreign imports into the Poverty Point region. Poverty Point peoples manufactured large numbers of fired-clay cooking balls and a smaller number of fired-clay figurines, indicating that the technological ability to produce fired pottery vessels was within their capacity. Over the past 25 years archaeologists have accumulated a considerable quantity of data suggesting that pottery vessel technology was a minor but important part of Poverty Point material culture (Hays and Weinstein 1999; Webb 1982). One issue remained to be solved. What was the origin of pottery vessel technology at Poverty Point, and how was this technology maintained through time? Was it largely an indigenous process, stimulated or encouraged by nonlocal imports? Or was the pottery at Poverty Point primarily imported? Results of our thin-sectioning study tentatively suggest that Poverty Point pottery vessel technology is at least partly an indigenous development. Poverty Point people were evidently making temperless (Tchefuncte- like) pottery using local clays; sherds from these pottery vessels are present in all strata of excavated samples that we analyzed. Fiber-tempered pottery, identified as Wheeler Plain, is also present at Poverty Point. Our data suggest that some fiber-tempered vessels were also manufactured locally (see also Stoltman, this volume). In addition to the local industry, Poverty Point people appear to have been importing pottery-most notably St. Johns Plain and contemporary decorated varieties, as well as Orange series pottery, both presumably from Florida (Webb 1982:42).