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TheMississippian culture was a collection ofNative American societies that flourished in what is now theMidwestern,Eastern, andSoutheastern United States from approximately 800 to 1600 CE, varying regionally. It was known for building large, earthenplatform mounds, and often other shaped mounds as well.[1][2] It was composed of a series of urban settlements andsatellite villages linked together by loose trading networks.[3] The largest city wasCahokia, believed to be a major religious center, located in what is present-day southernIllinois.
The Mississippian way of life began to develop in theMississippi River Valley (for which it is named). Cultures in the tributaryTennessee River Valley may have also begun to develop Mississippian characteristics at this point. Almost all dated Mississippian sites predate 1539–1540 (whenHernando de Soto explored the area),[4] with notable exceptions beingNatchez communities. These maintained Mississippian cultural practices into the 18th century.[5]
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A number of cultural traits are recognized as being characteristic of the Mississippians. Although not all Mississippian peoples practiced all of the following activities, they were distinct from their ancestors in the adoption of some or all of these traits.
The Mississippians had nowriting system or stone architecture. They worked naturally occurring metal deposits, such as hammering andannealing copper for ritual objects such asMississippian copper plates and other decorations,[6] but did not smelt iron or practice bronzemetallurgy.
The Mississippian stage is usually divided into three or more chronological periods. Each period is an arbitrary historical distinction varying regionally. At a particular site, each period may be considered to begin earlier or later, depending on the speed of adoption or development of given Mississippian traits. The "Mississippian period" should not be confused with the "Mississippian culture". The Mississippian period is the chronological stage, while Mississippian culture refers to the cultural similarities that characterize this society.
The termMiddle Mississippian is also used to describe the core of the classic Mississippian culture area. This area covers the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the Mid-South area, including western and central Kentucky, western Tennessee, and northern Alabama and Mississippi. Sites in this area often contain large ceremonial platform mounds, residential complexes and are often encircled by earthen ditches and ramparts orpalisades.[11]
Middle Mississippian cultures, especially the Cahokia polity located nearEast St. Louis, Illinois, were very influential on neighboring societies. High-status artifacts, includingstone statuary andelite pottery associated with Cahokia, have been found far outside of the Middle Mississippian area. These items, especially the pottery, were also copied by local artists.
The termSouth Appalachian Province was originally used byW. H. Holmes in 1903 to describe a regional ceramic style in the southeast involving surface decorations applied with a carved wooden paddle. By the late 1960s, archaeological investigations had shown the similarity of the culture that produced the pottery and the midwesternMississippian pattern defined in 1937 by the Midwestern Taxonomic System.
In 1967,James B. Griffin coinedSouth Appalachian Mississippian to describe the evolving understanding of the peoples of the Southeast.[14] South Appalachian Mississippian area sites are distributed across a contiguous area including Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, South Carolina, central and western North Carolina, and Tennessee. Chronologically this area became influenced by Mississippian culture later than the Middle Mississippian area (about 1000 as compared to 800) to its northwest. It is believed that the peoples of this area adopted Mississippian traits from their northwestern neighbors.[11]
Typical settlements were located on riverine floodplains and included villages with defensive palisades enclosing platform mounds and residential areas.[11]Etowah andOcmulgee in Georgia are both prominent examples of major South Appalachian Mississippian settlements. Both include multiple large earthwork mounds serving a variety of functions. These large networks of mounds and settlements coalesced into larger polities such asMoundville,Cofitachequi, andOcute
Villages with single platform mounds were more typical of the river valley settlements throughout the mountainous area of southwest North and South Carolina and southeastern Tennessee that were known as the historic Cherokee homelands. InWestern North Carolina for example, some 50 such mound sites in the eleven westernmost counties have been identified since the late 20th century, following increased research in this area of the Cherokee homeland.[15]
The Caddoan Mississippian area, a regional variant of the Mississippian culture, covered a large territory, including what is now easternOklahoma, westernArkansas, northeasternTexas, and northwesternLouisiana. Archaeological evidence has led to a scholarly consensus that the cultural continuity is unbroken from prehistory to the present, and that theCaddo and relatedCaddo language speakers in prehistoric times and at first European contact are the direct ancestors of the modernCaddo Nation of Oklahoma.[16]
The climate in this area was drier than areas in the eastern woodlands, hindering maize production, and the lower population on the plains to the west may have meant fewer neighboring competing chiefdoms to contend with. Major sites such asSpiro and theBattle Mound Site are in theArkansas River andRed River Valleys, the largest and most fertile of the waterways in the Caddoan region, where maize agriculture would have been the most productive.[17] The sites generally lacked woodenpalisade fortifications often found in the major Middle Mississippian towns. Living on the western edge of the Mississippian world, the Caddoans may have faced fewer military threats from their neighbors. Their societies may also have had a somewhat lower level ofsocial stratification.
The Caddoan people were speakers of one of the manyCaddoan languages.[16] These languages once had a broad geographic distribution, but many are now extinct. The modern languages in the Caddoan family include Caddo andPawnee.
Hernando de Soto led an expedition into the area in the early 1540s, heencountered several native groups now thought to have been Caddoan. Composed of many tribes, the Caddo were organized into three confederacies, theHasinai,Kadohadacho, andNatchitoches, which were all linked by their similar languages.
The Plaquemine culture was anarchaeological culture in the lowerMississippi River Valley in westernMississippi and easternLouisiana. Good examples of this culture are theMedora site (thetype site for the culture and period) inWest Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, and theAnna,Emerald Mound,Winterville andHolly Bluff sites located in Mississippi.[11] Plaquemine culture was contemporaneous with the Middle Mississippian culture at theCahokia site nearSt. Louis, Missouri. It is considered ancestral to theNatchez andTaensa Peoples.[18]
Although the Mississippian culture was heavily disrupted before a complete understanding of the political landscape was written down, many Mississippian political bodies were documented and others have been discovered by research.
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Mississippian peoples were ancestral to the majority of the American Indian nations living in this region when European trade began.[19] The historic and modern day American Indian nations believed to have descended from the overarching Mississippian culture include: theAlabama,Apalachee,Arikara,Caddo,Chickasaw,[20]Catawba,[citation needed]Choctaw,[20]Muscogee Creek,Guale,Hitchiti,Ho-Chunk,[citation needed]Houma,Iowa,[citation needed]Kansa,Koroas,[20]Missouria,Mobilian,Natchez,[20]Omaha,Osage (possibly),[20]Otoe,[citation needed]Pawnee,Ponca,[citation needed]Quapaw (possibly),[20]Seminole (broad origins),[21]Taensas,[20]Tunicas,[20]Yamasee,Yazoos,[20] andYuchi.[citation needed]
Scholars have studied the records ofHernando de Soto's expedition of 1539–1543 to learn of his contacts with Mississippians, as he traveled through their villages of the Southeast. He visited many villages, in some cases staying for a month or longer. Thelist of sites and peoples visited by the Hernando de Soto Expedition chronicles those villages. Some encounters were violent, while others were relatively peaceful. In some cases, de Soto seems to have been used as a tool or ally in long-standing native feuds. In one example, de Soto negotiated a truce between thePacaha and theCasqui.
De Soto's later encounters left about half of the Spaniards and perhaps many hundreds of Native Americans dead. The chronicles of de Soto are among the first documents written about Mississippian peoples and are an invaluable source of information on their cultural practices. The chronicles of theNarváez expedition were written before the de Soto expedition; the Narváez expedition informed the Court of de Soto about the New World.
After the destruction and flight of the de Soto expedition, the Mississippian peoples continued their way of life with little direct European influence. Indirectly, however, European introductions dramatically changed these native societies. Because the natives lackedimmunity toinfectious diseases unknowingly carried by the Europeans, such asmeasles andsmallpox, epidemics caused so many fatalities that they undermined the social order of many chiefdoms. Some groups adopted European horses and changed tonomadism.[22] Political structures collapsed in many places.
AtJoara, nearMorganton, North Carolina, Native Americans of the Mississippian culture interacted withSpanish colonizers of theJuan Pardo expedition, who built a base there in 1567 calledFort San Juan. Expedition documentation and archaeological evidence of the fort and Native American culture both exist. The soldiers were at the fort about 18 months (1567–1568) before the natives killed them and destroyed the fort. (They killed soldiers stationed at five other forts as well; only one man of 120 survived.) Sixteenth-century Spanish artifacts have been recovered from the site, marking the first European colonization in the interior of what became the United States.[23]
By the time more documentary accounts were being written, the Mississippian way of life had changed irrevocably. Some groups maintained an oral tradition link to their mound-building past, such as the late 19th-centuryCherokee.[24] Other Native American groups, having migrated many hundreds of miles and lost their elders to diseases, did not know their ancestors had built the mounds dotting the landscape. This contributed to the myth of theMound Builders as a people distinct from Native Americans, which was rigorously debunked byCyrus Thomas in 1894.
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| Upper Mississippian cultures |
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