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Abstract
Poverty Point has been both a marvel and a mystery to archaeologist for decades. Thus far, research has expanded our understanding of the temporal, geological and symbolic significance of the mounds and ridges, yet now archaeology has come to a place where it is possible to expand past these avenues of research to study the advances in labor and technology that went on in the shadows of these monuments. In this thesis I intended to explore the development of specialized labor by arguing that the numerous perforators found at Poverty Point could have been used to create the massive quantity of baskets required for the construction of the mounds at the Poverty Point through a combination of morphometric and a use-wear analysis. Based on the results of these analysis I have concluded that not only were the perforators not used as scrapers in the processing of river cane, it is likely that they were never used in a scraping capacity to begin with.
Rather, the evidence supports that they were used either as drills or as perforators. While as of right now it cannot be said at this moment what material the perforators were used to drill, the number of artifacts, the spectrum of shape and consistent wear patterns suggest that it was most likely something that was produced in mass, likely tied to another of the domestic tasks at the site. One possibility is that the perforators were used in lapidary production, particularly the drilling of beads, figurines, and the hematite plummets also found at the site. Previous works (Lipo 2014) have suggested that the plummets were used a loom weights in the production of textiles, and they are one of the few artifact classes that can rival the perforators in terms of sheer numbers.
