Graeber / Wengrow 142: "Poverty Point is 'a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone,' so the staggering quantities of lithic tools, weapons, and lapidary ornaments found there must all have been originally carried from somewhere else"
However, the site does not have a "commodity culture," and has no known trade goods
"If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images"
"in more recent Amerindian societies it was usually ownership of these 'incorporeal' goods (which [have been] compared to our patents and copyrights) that unlocked rights of usufruct over land and resources, rather than direct ownership of territory" (549, in footnote, see Lowie (1928))
"The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometrical principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early peoples throughout a significant portion of the Americas. The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings"
yet "it is absent from most histories of North American urbanism, let alone urbanism in general" (164)