This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

spread Southeastern social phenomenon known as dualism, a system which divides a community into two groups of people, called moieties, which perform reciprocal services. The two moieties are usually organized on the basis of an opposition, upstream-downstream, sky-earth, east-west, or in many Southeastern cases, white (peace moiety) versus red (war moiety). Correlations between these northern-southern artifact clusters suggest that marriages in the Poverty Point community were predicated on rank and moiety exogamy. Higher ranked men and women had to choose marriage partners from among lower-ranked people of opposite moieties.
Th, final critical point for establishing conformity with the chiefdom model lies in ascertaining that the subsistence base was sufficient to permit surplus accumulation. It has long been argued without direct evidence that maize cultivation constituted the main source of food in the Poverty Point culture. The few faunal and floral remains recovered, however, have all been endemic wild forms. How can we explain the accomplishments of this culture in the apparent absence of agriculture?
I	feel that a hypothetical subsistence strategy, which I have termed “forest-edge efficiency,” furnishes one means by which Poverty Point culture could have sustained itself without agriculture. In Poverty Point chiefdoms, villages were founded along ecological boundaries or seams where at least two strongly contrasting ecosystems joined. Such situations in the lower Mississippi Valley assured the highest possible yield of game and plant foods. Furthermore, man’s activities and natural inundation in these areas would have created extensive “disturbed habitats,” whose faunal and floral invaders (such as pigweed, goosefoot, smartweed, sumpweed, ragweed and wild millet) provided some of the most prolific and widely utilized foodstuffs in the eastern United States in prehistoric times. While the nutritional potential of these areas and conditions has not been quantified, I am convinced that a harvesting program geared to the seasons and coupled with regional redistribution could have produced the communal surplus and spare time associated with spiraling cultural advances. From this perspective, the identification of the specific food-producing technique, whether intensive collecting, semicultivation, or true agriculture, becomes less crucial.
Patterns of artifact distribution in the small outlying villages indicate that the basic unit of economic production and consumption in Poverty Point society was the nuclear family. Division of labor based on sex has been definitively established from the hand and finger impressions on baked clay objects. Women and children made these hand-molded cooking briquettes, whereas men presumably made most of the stone tools, hunted and obtained trade materials. Evidence for ecological specialization at the village level, a particular feature of chiefdom economics, comes from the existence of settlement dyads—upland edge vis-a-vis lowland villages—and from the discovery that some of the flood plain villages have a relatively large number of specialized tools (primarily chipped hoes) which occur only rarely in nearby upland villages and towns.
The most dramatic evidence for an economic surplus, however, lies in the massive labor expended on the monuments at Poverty Point. One reasonable estimate has about 1,350 able-bodied adults working seventy days out of the year for three years just to build the semicircular earthworks. The society’s ability to support specialized craftsmen in addition to corvee laborers furnishes us with a final indication of an efficient chiefdom economy. Study of distribution of artifacts at the Poverty Point site has demonstrated that lapidaries, and possibly other specialists, were maintained by administrative officials. The distribution of many classes of finished stone ornaments differs from the distribution of raw materials and production rejects. This implies that stone beads, pendants, carved figurines, bangles and other ornaments were made by skilled artisans, who then turned the fruits of their labors over to the higher-ranked persons who wore them.
Xn short, we can detect all of the characteristics of chiefdoms, to a greater or lesser degree, at Poverty Point. True, we still do not know what foodstuffs or food-getting techniques were used at Poverty Point, but certainly the lacuna does not invalidate the other characteristics of the model which have been independently corroborated. Indeed, we may safely conclude that the geographically largest, sociopolitical unit in Poverty Point culture was the chiefdom.
Now we must support the claim that Poverty Point culture arose independently as a consequence of local cultural adaptations to the specific environmental conditions of the lower Miss-
104