By 2200 BC, during the Late Archaic period the Poverty Point culture occupied much of Louisiana and was spread into several surrounding states. Evidence of this culture has been found at more than 100 sites, including the Jaketown Site near Belzoni, Mississippi. The largest and best-known site is near modern-day Epps, Louisiana at Poverty Point. The Poverty Point culture may have hit its peak around 1500, making it the first complex culture, and possibly the first tribal culture, not only in the Mississippi Delta but in the present-day United States. Its people were in villages that extended for nearly 100 miles across the Mississippi River. It lasted until approximately 700 BC. Woodland period The Poverty Point culture was followed by the Tchefuncte and Lake Cormorant cultures of the Tchula period, local manifestations of Early Woodland period. These descendant cultures differed from Poverty Point culture in trading over shorter distances, creating less massive public projects, completely adopting ceramics for storage and cooking. The Tchefuncte culture were the first people in Louisiana to make large amounts of pottery. Ceramics from the Tchefuncte culture have been found in sites from eastern Texas to eastern Florida, and from coastal Louisiana to southern Arkansas. These cultures lasted until 200 AD. The Middle Woodland period started in Louisiana with the Marksville culture in the southern and eastern part of the state and the Fourche Maline culture in the northwestern part of the state. The Marksville culture takes its name from the Marksville Prehistoric Indian Site in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. These cultures were contemporaneous with the Hopewell cultures of Ohio and Illinois, and participated in the Hopewell Exchange Network. At this time populations became more sedentary and began to establish semi-permanent villages and to practice agriculture, planting various cultigens of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. The populations began to expand, and trade with various non-local peoples also began to increase. Trade with peoples to the southwest brought the bow and arrow An increase in the hierarchical structuring of their societies began during this period, although it is not clear whether it was internally developed or borrowed from the Hopewell. The dead were treated in increasingly elaborate ways, as the first burial mounds are built at this time. Political power begins to be consolidated; the first platform mounds and ritual centers were constructed as part of the development of a hereditary political and religious leadership. By 400 AD in