‘Oddball’ prehistoric mystery emerges in Louisiana: Decorated, abstract mud balls

A prehistoric site dating back to 1100 BC is teasing archaeologists in Louisiana with a mystery, and it appears to have an element of whimsy.

Abstract, highly decorated mud balls are being found buried at the Poverty Point World Heritage Site, 260 miles northwest of New Orleans, according to a Facebook post.

The mud balls were baked in fires, making them so durable that they outlasted the culture that made them, the post says.

Why were they made? What were they used for? And what do the decorations mean?

Is it art? Or was there a deeper meaning?

“These oddball artifacts are another part of what makes this site interesting and mysterious,” Poverty Point officials wrote Facebook.

“The forms are generally pretty abstract, so the meaning of the shapes is unknown. Even so, patterns have emerged because some of the forms are repeated.”

Among those patterns: Spider webs, lotus pods, the sun, and what may be an owl “with two big eyes carefully indented by ancient fingertips,” according to the Facebook post. Some also look like dice, experts wrote.

The mud balls come from a 3500-year-old site in Louisiana that is itself a 400-acre mystery. It was active between 1700 and 1100 B.C., and was at one time the largest settlement of Native Americans on the continent, experts at the site say. .

Poverty Point is “a rare remnant of an exceptional culture” that left behind five “massive” dirt mounds and a half dozen “rows of semi-elliptical concentric ridges,” according to the site’s Facebook page. It likely took five million hours of labor to build the mounds and ridges, site experts believe.

Archaeologists now suspect that collective of earthworks was a pilgrimage site of some kind.

Among the details archaeologist have also established is that the people who built the site used “cooking balls” to prepare food: Baked lumps of dirt that were used like hot rocks. The baked clay balls are called PPO’s or Poverty Point Objects, researchers say.

But the decorated clay balls are a different thing completely, and there’s even evidence people carried them around to other regions, archaeologists said on Facebook.

“Right now, we definitely don’t think these were used for cooking like the standard PPOs even though they’re also mostly made from baked dirt,” the site posted.

Adding to the mystery: Some of the decorated mud balls were created using soil not found hundreds of miles from the Louisiana site, including clay-rich soils from the Tennessee River Valley and and soil from the Gulf Coast, according to Poverty Point experts.

That adds yet another question to the mystery: Were pilgrims bringing the decorated balls to Poverty Point for some important reason?

This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 8:27 AM with the headline "‘Oddball’ prehistoric mystery emerges in Louisiana: Decorated, abstract mud balls."