Mississippian culture

Mississippian culture
1
Mississippian culture
The Mississippian culture was a
mound-building Native American culture
that flourished in what is now the
Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern
United States from approximately 800 CE to
1500 CE, varying regionally.[1]
The Mississippian way of life began to
develop in the Mississippi River Valley (for
which it is named). Cultures in the tributary
Tennessee River Valley may have also
begun
to
develop
Mississippian
characteristics at this point. Almost all dated
Mississippian sites predate 1539-1540
(when Hernando de Soto explored the area).
A map showing approximate areas of various Mississippian and related cultures.
Cultural traits
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 adoption of some or all of these traits.
1. The construction of large, truncated earthwork pyramid
mounds, or platform mounds. Such mounds were usually
square, rectangular, or occasionally circular. Structures
(domestic houses, temples, burial buildings, or other) were
usually constructed atop such mounds.
2. Maize-based agriculture. In most places, the development of
Mississippian culture coincided with adoption of comparatively
large-scale, intensive maize agriculture, which supported larger
populations and craft specialization.
3. The adoption and use of riverine (or more rarely marine) shells
as tempering agents in their shell tempered pottery.
4. Widespread trade networks extending as far west as the
Rockies, north to the Great Lakes, south to the Gulf of Mexico,
and east to the Atlantic Ocean.
A Mississippian priest, with a ceremonial flint mace
and severed head. Artist Herb Roe, based on a repoussé
copper plate.
5. The development of the chiefdom or complex chiefdom level of social complexity.
6. The development of institutionalized social inequality.
7. A centralization of control of combined political and religious power in the hands of few or one.
Mississippian culture
2
8. The beginnings of a settlement hierarchy, in which one major center (with mounds) has clear influence or control
over a number of lesser communities, which may or may not possess a smaller number of mounds.
9. The adoption of the paraphernalia of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), also called the Southern
Cult. This is the belief system of the Mississippians as we know it. SECC items are found in Mississippian-culture
sites from Wisconsin (see Aztalan State Park) to the Gulf Coast, and from Florida to Arkansas and Oklahoma.
The SECC was frequently tied in to ritual game-playing, as with chunkey.
The Mississippians had no writing system or stone architecture. They worked naturally occurring metal deposits,
such as hammering and annealing copper for ritual objects like Mississippian copper plates and other decorations,[2]
but did not smelt iron or make bronze metallurgy.
Chronology
The Mississippi stage is usually divided into three or more
chronological periods. Each of these periods is an arbitrary historical
distinction that varies from region to region. At one site, each period
may be considered to begin earlier or later, depending on the speed of
adoption or development of given Mississippian traits. The
"Mississippi period" should not be confused with the "Mississippian
culture". The Mississippi period is the stage, while Mississippian is
referred to as the cultural similarities that characterize this society.
• Early Mississippi cultures had just transitioned from the Late
Woodland period way of life (500–1000 C.E.). Different groups
abandoned tribal lifeways for increasing complexity, sedentism,
centralization, and agriculture. The Early Mississippi period was from c. 1000 to 1200 C.E. Production of surplus
corn and attractions of the regional chiefdoms led to rapid population concentrations in major centers.
Stone effigies found at the Etowah Site
• The Middle Mississippi period reflects the high point of the Mississippi era. The expansion of the great metropolis
and ceremonial complex at Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), the formation of other complex chiefdoms, and the
spread and development of SECC art and symbolism are characteristic changes of this period. The Mississippian
traits listed above came to be widespread throughout the region. In most places, this period is recognized as
occurring c. 1200–1400 C.E.
• The Late Mississippi period, usually considered from c. 1400 to European contact, is characterized by increasing
warfare, political turmoil, and population movement. The population of Cahokia dispersed early in this period
(1350–1400), perhaps migrating to other rising political centers. More defensive structures are often seen at sites,
and sometimes a decline in mound-building and ceremonialism. Although some areas continued an essentially
Middle Mississippian culture until the first significant contact with Europeans, the population of most areas had
dispersed or were experiencing severe social stress by 1500.[3][4][5] Along with the contemporary Anasazi, these
cultural collapses coincide with the global climate change of the Little Ice Age. Scholars have theorized that
drought and the collapse of maize agriculture, together with possible deforestation and overhunting by the
concentrated populations, forced them to move away from major sites.
Mississippian culture
3
Regional variations
Middle Mississippian
The term Middle 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 or palisades.[6]
Middle Mississippian cultures, especially the Cahokia polity
located near East St. Louis, Illinois, was very influential on
neighboring societies. High status artifacts, including stone
statuary and elite 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.
Hollow ceramic jug showing the underwater panther
from the Mississippian culture, found at Rose Mound
in Cross County, Arkansas, U.S., 1400-1600. height: 8
inches (20 cm).
• Cahokia: The largest and most complex Mississippian site and
the largest Pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, Cahokia
was possibly the first, and is considered to have been the most
influential of the Mississippian culture centers.
• Angel Mounds: A chiefdom in southern Indiana near
Evansville. It is thought by some archaeologists that the Late
Mississippian Caborn-Welborn culture developed from the
Angel Phase people around 1400 CE and lasted to around 1700
CE.[7]
• Kincaid Site: A major Mississippian mound center in southern
Illinois across the Ohio River from Paducah, Kentucky.
The Kincaid Site as it may have looked at its peak
• Moundville: Ranked with Cahokia as one of the two most important sites at the core of the Mississippian
culture,[8] located near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
• The Parkin Site: The type site for the "Parkin phase", an expression of Late Mississippian culture, believed by
many archaeologists to be the province of Casqui visited by Hernando de Soto in 1542.[9]
South Appalachian Mississippian
The term South Appalachian Province was originally used by W. 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 which produced the pottery and the midwestern
Mississippian pattern defined by the Midwestern Taxonomic System in 1937. In 1967 James B. Griffin coined South
Appalachian Mississippian to describe the evolving understanding of the peoples of the Southeast.[10] South
Appalachian Mississippian area sites are distributed across a contiguous area including Alabama, Georgia, northern
Florida, South Carolina, and central and western North Carolina and Tennessee. Chronologically this area became
Mississippianized later than the Middle Mississippian area (about 1000 CE as compared to 800 CE) to its northwest
and is believed that the peoples of this area adopted Mississippian traits from their northwestern neighbors.[6]
Typical settlements were located on riverine floodplains and included villages with defensive palisades enclosing
platform mounds and residential areas.[6] Etowah and Ocmulgee(both located in Georgia) are prominent examples of
Mississippian culture
4
the South Appalachian Mississippian settlements.
Caddoan Mississippian
The Caddoan Mississippian area, a regional variant of the
Mississippian culture, covered a large territory, including what is now
Eastern Oklahoma, Western Arkansas, Northeast Texas, and Northwest
Louisiana. Archaeological evidence that the cultural continuity is
unbroken from prehistory to the present, and that the direct ancestors
of the Caddo and related Caddo language speakers in prehistoric times
and at first European contact and the modern Caddo Nation of
Oklahoma is unquestioned today.[11]
The climate in this area was drier than areas in the eastern woodlands,
Map of the Caddoan Mississippian culture and
hindering maize production, and the lower population on the plains to
some important sites
the west may have meant fewer neighboring competing chiefdoms to
contend with. Major sites such as Spiro and the Battle Mound Site are in the Arkansas River and Red River Valleys,
the largest and most fertile of the waterways in the Caddoan region, where maize agriculture would have been the
most productive.[12] The sites generally lacked wooden palisade 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 of social
stratification.
The Caddoan people were speakers of one of the many Caddoan languages.[13] The Caddoan languages once had a
broad geographic distribution, but many are now extinct. The modern languages in the Caddoan family include
Caddo and Pawnee, now spoken mainly by elderly people.
The Hernando de Soto led an expedition into the area in the early 1540s, he encountered several Native groups now
thought to have been Caddoan. Composed of many tribes, the Caddo were organized into three confederacies, the
Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches, which were all linked by their similar languages.
Plaquemine Mississippian
The Plaquemine culture was an archaeological culture in the lower
Mississippi River Valley in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana.
Good examples of this culture are the Medora Site (the type site for the
culture and period) in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, and the
Anna, Emerald Mound, Winterville and Holly Bluff sites located in
Mississippi.[14] Plaquemine culture was contemporaneous with the
Middle Mississippian culture in the Cahokia site in St. Louis, Missouri.
It is considered ancestral to the Natchez and Taensa Peoples.[15]
• Emerald Mound: A Plaquemine Mississippian period archaeological
site located on the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton,
Mississippi. The site dates from the period between 1200 and 1730
CE. The platform mound is the second-largest Pre-Columbian
earthwork in the country, after Monks Mound at Cahokia.
Map showing the geographical extent of the
Plaquemine cultura and some of its major sites
• Grand Village of the Natchez: The main village of the Natchez people, with three mounds. The only mound site
to be used and maintained into historic times.
Mississippian culture
5
Known Mississippian chiefdoms
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.
Related modern nations
Mississippian peoples were almost certainly ancestral to the majority of the American Indian nations living in this
region in the historic era. The historic and modern day American Indian nations believed to have descended from the
overarching Mississippian Culture include: the Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek,
Guale, Hitchiti, Houma, Kansa, Missouri, Mobilian, Natchez, Osage Nation, Quapaw, Seminole, Tunica-Biloxi,
Yamasee, and Yuchi.
Contact with Europeans
At Joara, near Morganton, North Carolina, Native Americans of
the Mississippian culture interacted with Spanish explorers of the
Juan Pardo expedition, who built a base there in 1567 called Fort
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.[16]
A map showing the de Soto route through the
Southeast
Scholars have studied the records of Hernando 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. The List of sites and peoples visited by the Hernando de Soto Expedition chronicles those
villages. Some encounters were violent, while others were relatively peaceable. 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 the
Pacaha and the Casqui.
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 the Narváez expedition were written before the de
Soto expedition; the Narváez expedition that 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 native societies in
the Eastern United States. Because the natives lacked immunity to new infectious diseases, such as measles and
smallpox, epidemics caused so many fatalities that they undermined the social order of many chiefdoms. Some
groups adopted European horses and changed to nomadism.[17] Political structures collapsed in many places.
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-century
Cherokee[18]. 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 the
Mississippian culture
Mound Builders as a people distinct from Native Americans, which was rigorously debunked by Cyrus Thomas in
1894.
Notes
[1] Adam King, "Mississippian Period: Overview" (http:/ / www. georgiaencyclopedia. org/ nge/ Article. jsp?id=h-707), New Georgia
Encyclopedia, 2002, accessed 15 Nov 2009
[2] Chastaina, Matthew L.; Deymier-Black, Alix C.; Kelly, John E.; Brown, James A.; Dunand,David C. (July 2011). "Metallurgical analysis of
copper artifacts from Cahokia" (http:/ / www. sciencedirect. com/ science/ article/ pii/ S0305440311000793). Journal of Archaeological
Science 38 (7). .
[3] Pauketat, Timothy R. (2003) “Resettled Farmers and the Making of a Mississippian Polity,” American Antiquity Vol. 68 No. 1
[4] Pauketat, Timothy R. (1998) “Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia,” Journal of Archaeological Research Vol. 6 No. 1
[5] Sullivan, Lynne P., Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands, Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2001 ISBN 1-57233-142-9
[6] "Southeastern Prehistory:Mississippian and Late Prehistoric Period" (http:/ / www. nps. gov/ seac/ outline/ 05-mississippian/ index. htm).
National Park Service. . Retrieved 2011-06-16.
[7] David Pollack (2004). Caborn-Welborn - Constructing a New Society after the Angel Chiefdom Collapse. University of Alabama Press. p. Pp.
24. ISBN 0-8173-5126-4.
[8] "Southeastern Prehistory: Mississippian and Late Prehistoric Period" (http:/ / www. nps. gov/ history/ seac/ outline/ 05-mississippian/ index.
htm). "National Park Service". . Retrieved 2007-12-04.
[9] Hudson, Charles M. (1997). Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun. University of Georgia Press.
[10] Ferguson, Leland G. (October 25 and 26, 1974). "South Appalachian Mississippian : A Definition and Introduction" (http:/ / www.
southeasternarchaeology. org/ PDF/ bulletins/ SEAC Bulletin 18. pdf). In Drexel A., Peterson. Thirty First Southeastern Archaeological
Conference. Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 8-9. .
[11] "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Caddoan Languages and Peoples" (http:/ / www. texasbeyondhistory. net/ tejas/ fundamentals/ languages.
html). . Retrieved 2010-02-04.
[12] "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Mississippian World" (http:/ / www. texasbeyondhistory. net/ tejas/ fundamentals/ miss. html). . Retrieved
2010-02-04.
[13] "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Caddoan Languages and Peoples" (http:/ / www. texasbeyondhistory. net/ tejas/ fundamentals/ languages.
html). . Retrieved 2010-02-04.
[14] "Mississippian and Late Prehistoric Period" (http:/ / www. nps. gov/ seac/ outline/ 05-mississippian/ index. htm). . Retrieved 2008-09-08.
[15] "The Plaquemine Culture, A.D 1000" (http:/ / bcn. boulder. co. us/ environment/ cacv/ cacvbrvl. htm). . Retrieved 2008-09-08.
[16] Constance E. Richards, " Contact and Conflict (http:/ / www. warren-wilson. edu/ ~arch/ berrysitepress/ amerarchspring2008. pdf)",
American Archaeologist, Spring 2004, accessed 26 Jun 2008
[17] Bense pp. 256–257, 275–279
[18] Hudson pp. 334
External references
• Bense, Judith A. Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: Paleoindian to World War I. Academic Press,
New York, 1994. ISBN 0-12-089060-7.
• Cheryl Anne Cox; and David H. Dye, eds; Towns and Temples along the Mississippi University of Alabama Press
1990
• Hudson, Charles; The Southeastern Indians. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1976. ISBN
0-87049-248-9.
• O'Conner, Mallory McCane. Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast. University Press of Florida, Florida A & M
University, Gainesville, Fla., 1995. ISBN 0-8130-1350-X.
• Pauketat, Timothy R.; The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America.
University of Alabama Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-8173-0728-8.
• Pauketat, Timothy R.; “The History of the Mississippians” in North American Archaeology Blackwell Publishing
Ltd., 2005.
6
Mississippian culture
External links
• The Mississippian and Late Prehistoric Period (http://www.nps.gov/seac/misslate.htm), National Park Service
Southeastern Archaeology Center
• Mississippian World (http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/tejas/fundamentals/miss.html), Texas Beyond
History
• Cahokia Mounds (http://www.cahokiamounds.com/cahokia.html)
• Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site (http://www.ngeorgia.com/parks/etowah.html)
• Indian Mounds of Mississippi, a National Park Service Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary (http://
www.nps.gov/nr/travel/mounds/)
• Moundville Archaeological Park (http://www.ua.edu/academic/museums/moundville/)
• Chucalissa Museum and Archaeological site (http://chucalissa.memphis.edu/)
• Encyclopedia of Alabama: Mississippian Period (http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.
jsp?id=h-1130)
• Animation: Towns and Temples of the Mississippian Culture-5 Sites (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yL8UuoYFYpQ)
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Article Sources and Contributors
Article Sources and Contributors
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