The site was a complex regional trade center that developed and was inhabited much earlier, from 2000 to 600 BCE, during the Poverty Point culture within the Late Archaic period of the United States.

The site has evidence of trade in raw materials and manufacture of finished items that were distributed through the network throughout the Eastern United States.

The mounds were constructed as part of a later, succeeding culture, built to mark the political and religious center of a chiefdom.

Because of its importance of a regional trade center of the Poverty Point culture in the Archaic period, and long human occupation, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

[7] Archeological investigations have found that the smaller mounds nearby were hundreds of years older than the surviving two; they were built by peoples of a preceding culture.