What Animals Lived In The Mississippian Period

Mound-building Native American culture in Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern U.s.

Approximate areas of various Mississippian and related cultures

The Mississippian culture was a Native American civilisation that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, varying regionally. It was known for building big, earthen platform mounds, and oftentimes other shaped mounds too.^{[1] [2]} It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by loose trading networks.^[3] The largest city was Cahokia, believed to be a major religious centre located in what is present-mean solar day southern Illinois.

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 besides begun to develop Mississippian characteristics at this point. About all dated Mississippian sites predate 1539–1540 (when Hernando de Soto explored the expanse),^[4] with notable exceptions being Natchez communities. These maintained Mississippian cultural practices into the 18th century.^[5]

Cultural traits [edit]

A number of cultural traits are recognized every bit being characteristic of the Mississippians. Although non all Mississippian peoples expert all of the post-obit activities, they were singled-out from their ancestors in the 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 round. Structures (domestic houses, temples, burying buildings, or other) were usually synthetic atop such mounds.
2. Maize-based agriculture. In nearly places, the development of Mississippian culture coincided with the adoption of comparatively large-calibration, intensive maize agronomics, which supported larger populations and craft specialization.
3. Shell-tempered pottery. The adoption and use of riverine (or more rarely marine) shells as tempering agents in ceramics.
4. Widespread trade networks extending as far west as the Rocky Mountains, north to the Great Lakes, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and east to the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The development of the chiefdom or circuitous chiefdom level of social complication.
6. The development of institutionalized social inequality.
7. A centralization of control of combined political and religious power in the hands of few or ane.
8. The beginnings of a settlement hierarchy, in which 1 major center (with mounds) has articulate 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), as well chosen the Southern Cult. This is the conventionalities system of the Mississippians equally we know information technology. SECC items are institute in Mississippian-civilisation sites from Wisconsin (encounter Aztalan State Park) to the Gulf Declension, and from Florida to Arkansas and Oklahoma. The SECC was frequently tied into ritual game-playing, equally with chunkey.

The Mississippians had no writing arrangement or rock architecture. They worked naturally occurring metallic deposits, such every bit hammering and annealing copper for ritual objects such as Mississippian copper plates and other decorations,^[six] but did not smelt fe or do bronze metallurgy.

Chronology [edit]

The Mississippi stage is ordinarily divided into three or more than chronological periods. Each period is an capricious historical stardom varying regionally. At a particular site, each menstruation may be considered to begin earlier or subsequently, depending on the speed of adoption or development of given Mississippian traits. The "Mississippi menstruation" should not be confused with the "Mississippian civilisation". The Mississippi period is the chronological stage, while Mississippian culture refers to the cultural similarities that narrate this social club.

• The Early Mississippi period (c. 1000–1200 CE) had only transitioned from the Late Woodland period way of life (500–1000). Unlike groups abandoned tribal lifeways for increasing complication, sedentism, centralization, and agriculture. Production of surplus corn and attractions of the regional chiefdoms led to rapid population concentrations in major centers.
• The Middle Mississippi period (c. 1200–1400) is the noon of the Mississippi era. The expansion of the great city and ceremonial complex at Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), the formation of other circuitous chiefdoms, and the spread and development of SECC art and symbolism are feature changes of this menses. The Mississippian traits listed higher up came to exist widespread throughout the region.
• The Late Mississippi flow (c. 1400–1540) is characterized by increasing warfare, political turmoil, and population movement. The population of Cahokia dispersed early in this flow (1350–1400), perhaps migrating to other rising political centers. More than defensive structures are often seen at sites, and sometimes a decline in mound-building and large-calibration, public ceremonialism. Although some areas connected an essentially Middle Mississippian culture until the first pregnant contact with Europeans, the population of most areas had dispersed or were experiencing astringent social stress past 1500.^{[7] [8] [9]} Forth with the contemporaneous Ancestral Pueblo peoples, these cultural collapses coincide with the global climate change of the Little Ice Age. Scholars theorize drought and the reduction of maize agriculture, together with possible deforestation and overhunting past the concentrated populations, forced them to motility abroad from major sites. This period concluded with European contact in the 16th century.

Regional variations [edit]

Centre Mississippian [edit]

A mound diagram of the Mississippian cultural period showing the multiple layers of mound construction, mound structures such every bit temples or mortuaries, ramps with log stairs, and prior structures under afterwards layers, multiple terraces, and intrusive burials.

Cahokia, the largest Mississippian civilisation site

Kincaid, showing its platform mounds and encircling palisade

The term Heart Mississippian is also used to describe the core of the archetype Mississippian civilization expanse. This expanse covers the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and nigh of the Mid-Due south surface 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.^[10]

Heart Mississippian cultures, particularly the Cahokia polity located nearly E St. Louis, Illinois, were very influential on neighboring societies. Loftier-condition artifacts, including rock bronze and elite pottery associated with Cahokia, have been found far exterior of the Heart Mississippian area. These items, peculiarly the pottery, were also copied by local artists.

• Cahokia: The largest and most complex Mississippian site and the largest Pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, Cahokia is considered to have been the most influential of the Mississippian civilisation centers. Discoveries found at the massive site include evidence of copper working (Mound 34), astronomy (Cahokia Woodhenge and the symbolic maximum southern moon rise aligned Rattlesnake Causeway), and ritual retainer burials (Mound 72).
• Angel Mounds: A chiefdom in southern Indiana well-nigh Evansville. It is thought by some archaeologists that the Belatedly Mississippian Caborn-Welborn civilisation developed from the Angel Stage people around 1400 CE and lasted to around 1700 CE.^[11]
• Kincaid Site: A major Mississippian mound middle in southern Illinois across the Ohio River from Paducah, Kentucky.
• Moundville: Ranked with Cahokia as one of the two near important sites at the core of the Mississippian civilization,^[ten] located nearly Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
• The Parkin Site: The type site for the "Parkin phase", an expression of Tardily Mississippian culture, believed by many archaeologists to be the province of Casqui visited by Hernando de Soto in 1542.^[12]

South Appalachian Mississippian [edit]

The term South Appalachian Province was originally used past Westward. H. Holmes in 1903 to describe a regional ceramic style in the southeast involving surface decorations practical with a carved wooden paddle. By the late 1960s, archaeological investigations had shown the similarity of the civilisation that produced the pottery and the midwestern Mississippian pattern divers in 1937 by the Midwestern Taxonomic Organization.

In 1967 James B. Griffin coined South Appalachian Mississippian to depict the evolving understanding of the peoples of the Southeast.^[13] South Appalachian Mississippian area sites are distributed beyond a contiguous area including Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, Due south Carolina, key and western North Carolina, and Tennessee. Chronologically this area became influenced by Mississippian culture later than the Middle Mississippian area (well-nigh 1000 CE as compared to 800 CE) to its northwest. It is believed that the peoples of this surface area adopted Mississippian traits from their northwestern neighbors.^[10]

Typical settlements were located on riverine floodplains and included villages with defensive palisades enclosing platform mounds and residential areas.^[10] Etowah and Ocmulgee in Georgia are both prominent examples of major Southward Appalachian Mississippian settlements. Both include multiple large earthwork mounds serving a variety of functions.

Villages with single platform mounds were more than typical of the river valley settlements throughout the mountainous area of southwest North and South Carolina, and southeastern Tennessee that were known every bit the celebrated Cherokee homelands. In Western North Carolina for example; some l such mound sites in the xi westernmost counties have been identified since the late 20th century, post-obit increased enquiry in this area of the Cherokee homeland.^[14]

Caddoan Mississippian [edit]

Map of the Caddoan Mississippian culture

Spiro, in eastern Oklahoma

The Caddoan Mississippian area, a regional variant of the Mississippian culture, covered a large territory, including what is now eastern Oklahoma, western Arkansas, northeastern Texas, and northwestern Louisiana. Archaeological evidence has led to a scholarly consensus that the cultural continuity is unbroken from prehistory to the present, and that the Caddo and related Caddo language speakers in prehistoric times and at first European contact are the straight ancestors of the modern Caddo Nation of Oklahoma.^[15]

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 accept 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 nigh fertile of the waterways in the Caddoan region, where maize agriculture would have been the well-nigh productive.^[sixteen] The sites generally lacked wooden palisade fortifications oftentimes found in the major Eye Mississippian towns. Living on the western edge of the Mississippian earth, the Caddoans may have faced fewer military threats from their neighbors. Their societies may too accept had a somewhat lower level of social stratification.

The Caddoan people were speakers of one of the many Caddoan languages.^[17] These languages once had a broad geographic distribution, just many are at present extinct. The modern languages in the Caddoan family include Caddo and Pawnee, at present spoken mainly past elderly people.

Hernando de Soto led an trek into the area in the early on 1540s, he encountered several native groups now thought to take been Caddoan. Composed of many tribes, the Caddo were organized into three confederacies, the Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches, which were all linked past their like languages.

Plaquemine Mississippian [edit]

Map showing the geographical extent of the Plaquemine culture and some of its major sites

The Plaquemine civilisation was an archaeological culture in the lower Mississippi River Valley in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. Skilful examples of this civilization are the Medora Site (the type site for the civilization and period) in Westward Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, and the Anna, Emerald Mound, Winterville and Holly Bluff sites located in Mississippi.^[10] Plaquemine culture was contemporaneous with the Middle Mississippian civilisation at the Cahokia site almost St. Louis, Missouri. It is considered ancestral to the Natchez and Taensa Peoples.^[18]

• Emerald Mound: A Plaquemine Mississippian period archaeological site located on the Natchez Trace Parkway nigh Stanton, Mississippi. The site dates from the period betwixt 1200 and 1730. The platform mound is the second-largest Pre-Columbian earthwork in the country, after Monks Mound at Cahokia.
• Chiliad Village of the Natchez: The main village of the Natchez people, with iii mounds. The only mound site to exist used and maintained into historic times.

Known Mississippian settlements [edit]

Although the Mississippian civilisation was heavily disrupted before a complete understanding of the political landscape was written downwardly, many Mississippian political bodies were documented and others accept been discovered past research.

[edit]

Mississippian peoples were almost certainly ancestral to the majority of the American Indian nations living in this region in the historic era. The celebrated and mod mean solar day American Indian nations believed to have descended from the overarching Mississippian Culture include: the Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Chickasaw, Catawba,^{[ citation needed ]} Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, Guale, Hitchiti, Ho-Chunk, Houma, Kansa, Missouria, Mobilian, Natchez, Osage, Quapaw, Seminole, Tunica-Biloxi, Yamasee, and Yuchi.^{[ citation needed ]}

Contact with Europeans [edit]

A map showing the de Soto route through the Southeast

Scholars take 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 calendar 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 peaceful. In some cases, de Soto seems to take been used as a tool or ally in long-standing native feuds. In 1 example, de Soto negotiated a truce between the Pacaha and the Casqui.

De Soto's later encounters left well-nigh one-half of the Spaniards and maybe many hundreds of Native Americans dead. The chronicles of de Soto are amidst the first documents written about Mississippian peoples and are an invaluable source of data on their cultural practices. The chronicles of the Narváez expedition were written before the de Soto expedition; the Narváez expedition informed the Court of de Soto almost the New World.

After the devastation and flight of the de Soto expedition, the Mississippian peoples continued their fashion of life with little direct European influence. Indirectly, however, European introductions dramatically changed these native societies. Because the natives lacked immunity to infectious diseases unknowingly carried by the Europeans, such as measles and smallpox, epidemics acquired so many fatalities that they undermined the social order of many chiefdoms. Some groups adopted European horses and changed to nomadism.^[19] Political structures collapsed in many places.

At Joara, virtually Morganton, Northward Carolina, Native Americans of the Mississippian culture interacted with Spanish colonizers of the Juan Pardo expedition, who built a base there in 1567 chosen Fort San Juan. Trek documentation and archaeological evidence of the fort and Native American culture both exist. The soldiers were at the fort near xviii months (1567–1568) before the natives killed them and destroyed the fort. (They killed soldiers stationed at five other forts besides; 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.^[20]

By the fourth dimension more documentary accounts were existence written, the Mississippian mode of life had changed irrevocably. Some groups maintained an oral tradition link to their mound-building by, such as the tardily 19th-century Cherokee.^[21] 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 Mound Builders equally a people distinct from Native Americans, which was rigorously debunked by Cyrus Thomas in 1894.

See also [edit]

• List of Mississippian sites
• Listing of burial mounds in the United States
• Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
• Southeastern Ceremonial Complex

Notes [edit]

1. ^ Adam Male monarch (2002). "Mississippian Flow: Overview". New Georgia Encyclopedia . Retrieved fifteen Nov 2009.
2. ^ John H. Blitz. "Mississippian Period". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Alabama Humanities Foundation.
3. ^ "Metropolitan Life on the Mississippi". Washington Mail. Archived from the original on 2010-01-15.
4. ^ "Mississippian Period Archaeological Sites". About.com Education . Retrieved 2016-12-thirteen .
5. ^ Barnett, Jim. "The Natchez Indians". Mississippi History Now. Retrieved 1 Oct 2013.
6. ^ Chastain, Matthew Fifty.; Deymier-Blackness, Alix C.; Kelly, John E.; Brown, James A.; Dunand, David C. (July 2011). "Metallurgical assay of copper artifacts from Cahokia". Journal of Archaeological Scientific discipline. 38 (7): 1727–1736. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2011.03.004.
7. ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (2003). "Resettled Farmers and the Making of a Mississippian Polity". American Antiquity. 68 (1): 39–66. doi:10.2307/3557032. JSTOR 3557032. S2CID 163856087.
8. ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (1998). "Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia". Journal of Archaeological Research. 6 (one): 45–89. doi:10.1023/A:1022839329522. S2CID 195219118.
9. ^ Sullivan, Lynne P., Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands, University of Tennessee Press, 2001 ISBN one-57233-142-9.
10. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Southeastern Prehistory:Mississippian and Tardily Prehistoric Period". National Park Service. Retrieved 2011-06-16 .
11. ^ David Pollack (2004). Caborn-Welborn - Constructing a New Society after the Angel Chiefdom Collapse. Academy of Alabama Press. p. 24. ISBN978-0-8173-5126-7.
12. ^ Hudson, Charles M. (1997). Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Lord's day . University of Georgia Press. ISBN9780820318882.
13. ^ Ferguson, Leland G. (October 25–26, 1974). Drexel A., Peterson (ed.). Southward Appalachian Mississippian: A Definition and Introduction (PDF). 30 First Southeastern Archaeological Conference. Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 8–9. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-fourteen.
14. ^ Steere, Benjamin A. (2015). "REVISITING PLATFORM MOUNDS AND TOWNHOUSES IN THE CHEROKEE HEARTLAND: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH" (PDF). Southeastern Archeology. 34 (3): 196–219. doi:10.1179/2168472315Y.0000000001. S2CID 155444628. Retrieved fifteen Dec 2020.
15. ^ "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Caddoan Languages and Peoples". Retrieved 2010-02-04 .
16. ^ "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Mississippian World". Retrieved 2010-02-04 .
17. ^ "Tejas-Caddo Fundamentals-Caddoan Languages and Peoples". Retrieved 2010-02-04 .
18. ^ "The Plaquemine Culture, A.D 1000". Cedar Mesa Project. Retrieved 2013-10-02 .
19. ^ Bense pp. 256–257, 275–279
20. ^ Constance Due east. Richards, "Contact and Disharmonize", American Archaeologist, Jump 2004, accessed 26 Jun 2008
21. ^ Hudson pp. 334

References [edit]

• Bense, Judith A. Archaeology of the Southeastern Us: Paleoindian to Globe War I. Academic Press, New York, 1994. ISBN 0-12-089060-seven.
• 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.
• Keyes, Charles R. Prehistoric Human in Iowa. Palimpsest viii(vi):185–229. (1927).
• O'Connor, Mallory McCane. Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast. University Press of Florida, Florida A & K University, Gainesville, Fla., 1995. ISBN 0-8130-1350-X.
• Pauketat, Timothy R.; The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native N America. Academy of Alabama Printing, 1994, ISBN 978-0-8173-0728-8.
• Pauketat, Timothy R.; "The Forgotten History of the Mississippians" in N American Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005.

External links [edit]

• The Mississippian and Belatedly Prehistoric Menstruum, National Park Service Southeastern Archaeology Center, archived at Net Annal
• Mississippian World, Texas Beyond History
• Cahokia Mounds
• Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site
• Indian Mounds of Mississippi, a National Park Service Find Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary
• Moundville Archaeological Park [1]
• Chucalissa Museum and Archaeological site
• Mississippian Period in Encyclopedia of Alabama
• Blitheness: Towns and Temples of the Mississippian Culture-five Sites

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture

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