[Illustration: Figure 12. Female Figurines of Baked Clay. a-b, d, Torsos; c, Head. Photographs courtesy of Brian Cockerham.] Religion is one of the most powerful motive forces in culture. So it was in Poverty Point culture. It provided sanctions, direction, meaning, and explanation of great mysteries. It was central to group organization and leadership. It was the single most important source of power and was probably the underlying motivation for communal building projects and other group activities. But unlike the other early great religions of the New World—Chavin in South America and Olmec in Lowland Mexico—Poverty Point religion seems to have lacked a special religious artwork. There are a few symbolic artifacts, such as fat-bellied owl pendants and locust effigies that have a widespread distribution (Webb 1971), but these objects often occur in earlier contexts and in contemporary, non-Poverty Point cultural situations. The lack of a widespread religious art style argues against the possibility of a universal state religion and implies that local populations had independent systems of worship. The mounds and the specialized objects that functioned in ceremonial realms were probably all involved in some way with religion and ritual. Yet the nature of Poverty Point religion and worship remains unknown. Ancestor worship has been mentioned as one possibility. Amulets and charms, if correctly identified, imply beliefs in spirit forces or perhaps nature spirits. Bird representations in stone and earth suggest that birds may have been deified. Bird symbolism was an integral part of Southeastern religions during the Christian Era, and possibly its beginnings were in Poverty Point beliefs. There is little information on Poverty Point burial practices. This is primarily due to the fact that there have been so few excavations, and those have been largely confined to residential areas in villages. Mound B at Poverty Point covered an ash bed which contained fragments of burned bone (Ford and Webb 1956:35). Most were tiny and unidentifiable, but one was the upper end of a burned human femur, proving that at least one person had been cremated and covered by the earthen tomb.