Today (technically yesterday now) marks a full year since I started my Substack column. A full year. Somehow, I made it, uploading mostly consistently throughout the past trip around the sun. I had a lot of successes and failures. But most of all, I learned much about this platform and about myself. It’s fun to look back on my earliest posts and see how my style, phrasing, spacing, and formatting have almost entirely changed.
To celebrate a year on Substack, I wanted to write an important post. I wanted it to be like nothing I’d done before. Something big. Something grand. Something powerful. Then I remembered how on vacation, I came up with the idea for a post (I mentioned the possible idea back in my post about an alligator). At the time, I had a barebone idea, but no way to word it nor a conclusion. I needed more time to think about it, as I said. But with more time, maybe it could become one of the most impactful Substacks I’ve written yet.
…Then I got two weeks of time to think about it, and it remained about the same. I had no conclusion. But maybe that was the point. There is no answer to what I was thinking. If there was, the issue wouldn’t have been there to begin with.
Maybe the point of this post is for you, the reader, to take a journey with me through raw thoughts and come to your own conclusions. If not that, maybe just contemplate and ponder with me.
This post is likely going to be the longest one I have ever written. It will probably be way past email length. For those of you who read it off of email, I apologize for inconveniencing you. And I also apologize to any reader for how long this is going to be. But trust me, you want to stick around until the end.
Now, dear reader, come take a trip with me. Come on a vacation from the rolling hills of Iowa coated in corn and soybeans. Come on a journey to the land of cotton and sugarcane. To a place with deep history and lore, both monumental and troubling. Come on a vacation from home, but not from thought.
And join me as we explore a place that changed my life.
MONOLITHS OF A BYGONE ERA: THE EARTHWORK CITIES
If you’ve read my post on Native American mounds or just know me as a person, I am a sucker for Cahokia.
For those of you unfortunately unaware, Cahokia is an ancient city in Illinois just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
Yep.
That’s right.
An ancient city in the Midwest.
To catch you up to speed, all Indigenous Americans were not just nomadic hunter-gatherers as American pop culture might conveniently lead you to believe (there’s nothing wrong with being a hunter-gatherer, but we’ll save that for the end). There were just as diverse cultures here in the Americas as there were on any continent. Many groups lived in semi-permanent and even permanent settlements. Many groups even took up farming. Corn, the crop that defines Iowa’s economy, was domesticated and bred by Native Americans.
These societies, as different as they were, had overlapping commonalities, just like any group of cultures living nearby one another. From the banks of the Mississippi River to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, certain cultural practices were shared between groups. These cultural practices came to define all of these individual groups as parts of the Woodland Culture.
The Woodland Culture lasted for a few thousand years and saw the rise and fall of multiple different societies and traditions. The Adena, the Hopewell, to name a few. Many of these groups started out as hunter-gatherers, but agriculture would eventually be introduced to them from the Southwest. Plenty of modern Indigenous nations and tribes, such as the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Mohawk, the Shawnee, and the Meskwaki for example, are descended from this broad culture.
Something that members of the Woodland Culture had in common, even when they were still hunter-gatherers, was mound building. Over the course of thousands of years, different groups of Woodland people would build mounds for different purposes. And they got pretty damn good at it too. Mound evolution is pretty easily understood, except for a certain outlier, but I digress…for now, anyway. Basically, most of the cultures followed this progression:
Cool, I can pile up dirt.
Hey, what’s even cooler is if I put important things like bodies and objects in these piles of dirt.
Yo, sick, I can make these piles bigger.
You know what? What if I started using certain soils here and certain soils there…
You won’t believe this, but I can shape the dirt piles now. Now I can make them into fancy designs, like lines, or circles, or chains, or cones, or even animal shapes.
NOW HEAR ME OUT…SCREW BURIAL MOUNDS. Those are a thing of the past! Get‘emouttahere! Now catch my drift…We build huge. Freakin’. Mounds. Colossal structures of molded earth, with platforms at the top, then put temples and houses at the top! Then we make CITIES out of these things! MOUND CITIES ARE THE FUTURE!
That is a gross oversimplification, but generally that is what scholars observed with the evolution of mound construction. They started out small and relatively simple, and as time went on, they became larger and more elaborate. They even learned what types of soil to use and where to create the most stable structures. They didn’t just pile up dirt, they used engineering to terraform the environment.
For a long time, mounds were built for burials. But towards the end of the Woodland Culture, large platform mounds were constructed not for burials but as structures. Temples and lodges were built at the tops. They became places of worship, housing, and public gathering.
After a while, a textbook civilization arose from these mound builders: The Mississippians. Their reign started over a thousand years ago and lasted up until European contact. They spread out across what would become the southeastern United States. They built plenty of mound cities, likely similar to the city-states of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia.
Cahokia is the best example remaining of this once great society. The centerpiece of the city, Monk’s Mound, is around 100 feet tall and dwarfs every structure around it. And this, my fellow traveler, is where we shall begin our journey…because it was one of the first stops on my family’s recent vacation down south.
This was probably my third or fourth time at the site, and it still impressed me. The capabilities of an ancient society in my own backyard that no one knew about astounded me. But I must admit, this time around, some of the magic was wearing off on me. Don’t get me wrong, I was still in complete wonder, but a melancholy thought creeped its way into my head.
We modern Americans have some romanticized vision of the Native American. He’s wise, brave, spiritual, in tune with nature, and rejects modernity. That stereotype is inherently problematic, but regardless, it has an effect on the way we Americans view these cultures. That’s why I was kind of shocked when I found out that nothing like that was happening at Cahokia.
I romanticize Cahokia because it’s different. I romanticize the Mississippians in general because they were different. But in other ways, they were so much like us. They had a bunch of the problems giant civilizations have now and always had.
Their cities were dirty. Based on the discovery of constantly replaced fortifications around the centers of their cities, these people were likely wartorn as well. Perhaps they fought off “savage tribes of barbarians” like how the Romans treated the people of Gaul. Or maybe, and possibly the more realistic answer, they were fighting off each other, like how Sparta and Athens used to fight. There was likely even human sacrifice in many Mississippian cities.
But the thing that was bugging me the most on this trip was the clear “wealth gaps” or at least power gaps between the people of Cahokia. The tops of mounds were reserved for sacred spaces and/or housing for the higher-ups within their society. Sure, some of them were public spaces, but even those likely had sacred value. The common people didn’t live atop the mounds of their mound cities, but rather at the bases of them. If that wasn’t enough, much of the housing was even outside of the city walls built to protect the settlement from attacks.
Cahokia wasn’t far from the Mississippi River. Many Mississippian cities are built near water, which is a common trend for cities in general. I couldn’t help but imagine when the floodwaters came, the peasants’ homes were washed away as the elite stayed dry in their “penthouses” of the time.
And there we reach the root of the problem. Perhaps the reason I was so focused on the failures of Cahokia rather than the successes this time around was because I was looking at it from a modern lens. Look at the world around us. The political atmosphere. The social atmosphere.
Ultra billionaires now sit on mountains of money while “middle class” people struggle to buy groceries. The billionaires don’t care. They’re the ones raising prices. They’re the ones causing inflation. But they blame it on the government. They point fingers at politicians who don’t agree with them, then support politicians who want to make it easier for the wealthy to control the poor. Slash business regulations, slash social programs, slash education to keep us too dumb to see through their plans and too desperate to do anything about it. Anyone who disagrees is a dirty communist and an enemy to American values.
I’m no sociology expert, but this sounds like textbook Conflict Theory to me, and I hate Conflict Theory. I hate it. I hate conflict to begin with.
I want our world to be more equal. I want us to strive to give everyone more equal chances, regardless of their race, gender, or religion. I want us not to fight but to unite. I want people to be able to get rich if they work at it, but not to fall back into poverty if they fail. I don’t want anyone taking advantage of anybody. I want us to be more caring, but that probably makes me a “dirty commie,” doesn’t it?
But take a look at the world around us. Why does it have to be this way? Why do we have to fight? And I don’t even need to take a look at the world around us. All I need to do is take a look around Cahokia.
At the top of Monk’s Mound, I could see a neighborhood just bordering the edge of the ancient city. And the houses looked deep in disrepair. A dirty trailer park was also nearby, and a lot of the businesses in the area looked like they had seen better days. Here, at the margins of this spectacular ancient city, were problems that existed back then and have only gotten worse now.
And over the course of this trip, I was about to get a crash course in poverty.
“EVERY DAY I HAVE THE BLUES”
As my family drove deeper into the South, I saw poverty like never before. I admit, it probably comes as no surprise to you, dear reader, that my life in small town Iowa sheltered me from some of the bigger issues of the world. Yes, my hometown has plenty of poverty issues. We even have homelessness issues. But all of that pales in comparison to what I saw zipping through the Mississippi and Louisiana countryside.
Entire towns were sunk by poverty issues. Neighborhoods looked more like ghettos. Businesses, even the gas stations, became edgier and edgier. Public spaces, like playgrounds, looked more suitable for horror films than children. But to top it off, you could see it in the people.
Even just driving past them, you could see the despair on their faces. The depression. The anguish. The weariness. Nobody in these communities seemed to be enjoying life. Sometimes, to me at least, they seemed to be resenting it. And maybe it was the paranoia talking, but sometimes I couldn’t shake the feeling they resented me while we passed by.
I also don’t think it would surprise you, dear reader, that there isn’t a lot of racial diversity from where I grew up. Most of the people back home are white. That’s just how most rural Iowa communities are now. That’s not how the communities were down South.
I couldn’t help but notice that many of these impoverished individuals we passed by were African American. Entire communities of African Americans we passed through were falling apart. And unfortunately, it made sense.
Going through Mississippi and Louisiana, one of my family’s biggest priorities was visiting musical sites. We went to an awesome blues club. We went to jazz museums. We went to blues museums. And it was at the B.B. King Museum I believe where a black pastor on a video said something that stuck with me. I can’t remember the exact way he put it, but it was something along the lines of, “Black people sang the blues because they were being oppressed.”
Brilliant black artists pioneered jazz and blues. They invented them. There’s a reason they invented them. There’s a reason they began singing the blues.
Once, I had the unfortunate experience of working with a painfully ignorant yet loudspoken individual. We’ve all been there. At the time, he was bitching to another worker about the then new Black Lives Matter movement. To sum it up, he hated it. He said something about how these people were getting way too worked up over a problem that ended “300 years ago” or something.
Anyone with a proper education, nay, anyone with a lick of common sense would cringe at that statement. For one thing, it is horribly wrong. For another thing, it proves how much we need to teach history and emphasize how these seemingly ancient events have completely shaped our lives. History defines the present. History defines us.
MONOLITHS OF A BYGONE ERA: LOST RICHES
It didn’t take me long to figure out that the story of the South was one of lost riches. The entire region was shaped by the actions of long gone wealthy folk, and everything since seems to have been carved out of the scraps of their legacy.
My family loved looking for old plantation houses. And who can blame us? They’re big and beautiful. They have wonderful architecture. But a problem that always resided in the back of my mind whenever talking about plantations was the thing I always associated with them.
Slavery.
I know there was way more to plantations than just slavery, but that’s where I always heard the word brought up most. When I hear “plantation,” I think “slavery.” I can’t help it.
A lot of the people I saw in despair over my trip were probably descendants of those slaves. Their hardships stem from the hardships their ancestors faced. Many of them remain in poverty because they were born into it, like their parents, and their parents’ parents, and so on. Yes, there’s social mobility, but it’s difficult to raise yourself out of those situations. It’s certainly not impossible, but it’s not entirely realistic either. And every day, with widening wealth gaps, increased inflation, and the continued system abuse from the ultra wealthy, it becomes harder and harder to rise up in the social pyramid.
But at the same time, it wasn’t only black people I saw suffering. I saw plenty of impoverished white folk as well. I was told that some white people still sympathize for the Confederacy because their families had money before the Civil War. They were rich plantation owners. Then after the war, they lost all that money. Now, some of their descendants live in poverty. Poverty these descendants likely blame on the North. Poverty these descendants probably blame on their family’s freed slaves.
One of the plantation “houses” we found was one that had burnt down, leaving only the Greek-style pillars behind in the forest. It was such a haunting sight. An eerie reminder of an age of prosperity long ago. But that age of prosperity was ushered on by a deplorable institution. It was said that the original owners of these ruins had to move out long before the fire took the house because they “lost a lot of their wealth” in the war.
I had to wonder how much of that wealth was slaves.
But I do admit, the Confederates lost a lot in that war. So many people poured a lot into it and got nothing but pain out of it. Many lost all their wealth.
But that wealth came from the exploitation of human lives in captivity. Is it possible for some people to thrive without them taking advantage of other lives? Do we only have power if we suppress someone else?
I see how the lives of everyone even now were affected by the mistakes of the past. People in the South continue to suffer from a long ended institution, an old war, and a failed attempt at Reconstruction, both black and white. Now the descendants of both slave and slave owner remain impoverished, probably blaming each other for their hardships.
They continue to suffer from a war led by the wealthy of the time, because hot take, the Civil War was caused by slavery. The South didn’t want to lose their economy, their economy was owned by the rich, the rich didn’t want to lose their free labor, so they led their people into a pointless and destructive war.
And the misery continues to this day.
PITIFUL PAST, PAINFUL PRESENT, FEAR FOR THE FUTURE
I have no problem with rich people. Hell, I want to be rich. I’d love to have all sorts of money. What I have a problem with is people taking advantage of each other. People exploiting others for their own personal gain.
It’s selfish. It’s despicable. It’s simply not human.
I want us to be more caring. I want us to take care of each other. I want us to lift each other up when we can. I want us to be more friendly. I want us to be more welcoming.
I don’t want our society to be obsessed with greed. I don’t want it to be directed by our own trivial desires. I don’t want us to cheat each other for our individual benefit.
I don’t want Conflict Theory to rule over us.
But maybe I’m being too much of an idealist. Besides, these problems are as old as Cahokia. Hell, they’re as old as civilization itself.
That’s until I found out they aren’t.
Remember that outlier in Woodland Culture history I was talking about earlier? I might have to remind you.
“Mound evolution is pretty easily understood, except for a certain outlier, but I digress…for now, anyway.”
Well, allow me to introduce you to a site in Northern Louisiana that changed my perspective on humanity forever.
Welcome to Poverty Point.
MONOLITHS OF A BYGONE ERA: A VISIT TO POVERTY POINT
I had heard of this site much earlier when I was researching Cahokia and the Mississippians. I heard that it was an outlier of sorts when it came to mound building cultures. I didn’t understand how much until we visited it this past vacation. With the help of a fantastic museum, friendly staff, and a wonderful tour guide, I realized how important this World Heritage Site is.
Allow me to introduce you to America’s first city.
It was a mound city, like those of the Mississippian Culture. The only problem was that the Mississippians are at least 2,000 years younger than Poverty Point.
You heard me.
2,000 years.
Nothing like Poverty Point had ever been seen before and wouldn’t be seen again until the age of the Mississippians. The Poverty Point people didn’t build burial mounds but platform mounds like the much later Mississippians. Why? We honestly don’t know. In fact, there are only a few human remains on the entire site, and they’re in a mound not even built by the people of Poverty Point but a much later Mississippian group who must’ve built that mound in honor of the Poverty Point ruins. What’s more? Those remains don’t even belong to those Mississippians either. The graves of a plantation owner and his wife were placed on the mound, their slaves being buried nearby. The site is actually named after their plantation, Poverty Point (because we have no idea what the people of Poverty Point called themselves).
Those are the only human remains in the entire city. We seriously do not know what they did with their dead. That remains a total mystery.
Another thing that baffles scientists…Civilizations need a surplus of food. That’s how they feed their city populations. Typically, that suggests agriculture. It has been a long held belief that hunter-gatherers cannot build cities for that reason. They need a more stable source of food.
Well, esteemed scholars, you certainly got the middle finger from the people of Poverty Point, as they seemingly had no idea what a farm was. The Mississippians of later times were avid farmers of crops. The people of Poverty Point, however, were entirely hunter-gatherers.
Yet again, you heard me.
Hunter-gatherers built a city.
And built a city they did. They constructed a bunch of long, curved mounds in a c-shape, sort of resembling an amphitheater. It is here where they built huts for permanent residence. But that was far from the only mound built there.
There’s three mounds in a line that points almost directly at True North. One used to be a platform mound that became a conical mound after the people “capped” the mound. Capping a platform mound means retiring a mound, making it impossible for people to walk on. Why would you retire a mound? Well, the tour guide said it was basically because the mound became “too powerful.”
What the hell does he mean the mound became “too powerful?!”
Maybe, since these likely held sacred significance, the mound gained so much religious status that the people became too obsessive, or it became too sacred to be walked on, or something crazy like that.
Another mound in this line is a square. That’s about all I got from it. They just built a huge square.
But between these mounds in the line is the largest mound at the site. It stands 72 feet high now, but was 100 feet tall when first constructed, rivaling Monk’s Mound 2,000 years later in height (albeit Monk’s Mound would’ve been about twice the volume). It’s debated how long Monk’s Mound took to build, but some estimates put it at a few decades while others put it at a few hundred years. How long do you think it took for the big mound at Poverty Point to be built?
30 to 90…days.
Yes.
Days.
The entire structure took, at most, three months to build. That’s millions of pounds of dirt moved by baskets in 90 days at the most.
And if that wasn’t enough, there’s a mound in the corner of their plaza that is so ridiculous I still laugh thinking about it. This mound is small, probably the smallest mound at the site. Yet how long do you think it took to build it? Years. Many years. The big one was built in one solid layer. This small one has over 20 layers. How is this possible? Some of those layers are as small as one and a half inches thick. Yeah. Every few years or so, they’d just add an inch and a half thick layer of dirt on top of this mound just because. Even better yet is the fact that they used different colored soils for each layer, making it a rainbow mound before it was covered in grass.
The stories of the mound constructions here are absolutely wild and quite frankly absurd. But it gets crazier when you dive into the little bits we know about the culture who built these mounds.
They were hunter-gatherers for one thing. It is insanely impressive that they were able to pull this off without the help of agriculture. Another thing is that they had some sort of trade route, as rocks and artifacts from all the way up in my home state of Iowa have been discovered at this site. This wasn’t just a permanent residence for some hunter-gatherers, it was a pilgrimage site for other groups of hunter-gatherers. A sort of Mecca, if you will.
Imagine, being a nomad from far off Iowa, traveling south to the sacred site. Once there, you have to climb a hill before you lay eyes upon the first terraformed city in the world. The only city in the world. At least, in your world. You’ve never seen and never again will see anything like this.
Another thing about their society is that it might’ve been matriarchal. We technically don’t know, but there’s a lot of female symbolism in their art. But then again, we’ve only uncovered so much of their art. A problem with Poverty Point is the fact that the people here were so darn clean.
Yeah, clean, unlike Cahokia or freaking Manhattan for that matter.
Archeologists struggle to find artifacts there because the ancient people already cleaned it all up. But from what we can tell, a lot of the objects found are similar to each other. Every home we’ve uncovered is about the same. While there are plenty of trinkets, no one seemed to have a lot more than anyone else. There didn’t seem to be as much value on objects as you’d think. While there was surely some kind of leadership structure, we can’t find proper evidence of it by looking at the homes. The homes almost suggest that everyone was of an equal economic status.
And another thing. There are no traces of fortifications at Poverty Point. There’s no evidence for any sort of violence. That suggests that in its 600 year history of habitation, Poverty Point may have never been subjected to war.
Let me repeat: They may have been free of war entirely.
The only reason they even seem to have left the place might’ve been due to shifts in the climate, not war.
Poverty Point wasn’t a utopia. A true utopia is impossible. But it didn’t suffer from some of the problems we do. Rather than look at its history and notice the hardships it gave me, I envy the peace they had that seems to have been lost. It seems that these “primitive” hunter-gatherers were always more civilized than us.
I don’t know how to conclude this juggernaut of a post. I don’t know if I can. I don’t really know what the takeaway is. Maybe because I don’t have a takeaway. This is a flow of raw thought. Maybe you have a takeaway. Maybe you don’t. Either way, thank you, dear reader, for sticking with me on this one.
I don’t know what the point of poverty is. I don’t know why it exists. I don’t know why we have to fight over it. What I do know is that there is a Poverty Point, and maybe some answers might be waiting there to be discovered.
I saw the Poverty Point image and title when I went out to substack. I was on my way to church and came back to read your post today. I target two main points of interest in my travels. Civil War battlefields and indigenous civilizations. I grew up on a farm in Western Illinois and am now more landlord than a real farmer. I love the less traveled and little inhabited places. I am planning a trip back to Tennessee and Mississippi and want to include a drive over to Poverty Point late this Fall. I enjoyed your post. Far less separates us from homo sapiens of 20,000 t0 30,000 years ago than we often imagine.
I enjoy reading your perceptions and opinions on so many diverse subjects. I think you have the right idea that there really is no point to poverty. Why in such a rich society as we are privileged to live in are there homeless and hungry people and families. Why don’t we care more for them than we do for people in other countries we send billions of humanitarian dollars to? Every change starts with someone who cares and can positively influence others. I think you are one. Thank you.