After the decline of the Hopewellian, Late Woodland cultures continued much as earlier
groups had.
--Foraging continued, but use of domesticated plants increased with starchy seed plants as
the major crops, but as with the Southwest, the major corn, beans and squash triad takes
on ever-increasing importance
--800 AD is a temporal marker, largely due to climatic change accompanying what has
been called the Neo-Atlantic climatic episode
Climate became more moist, allowing the spread of horticulture
--In some areas, as in the Yazoo Basin of Mississippi, there is a transition to less well developed complexes, but by 800 AD or earlier, the Coles Creek complex shows the construction of earthen mounds, carefully shaped truncated pyramids
The concept of these temple mounds and plazas is usually explained as being of Mesoamerican origin --no real local evidence to suggest independent origin
Associated with the mounds is a distinctive ceramic style with deeply incised lines parallel to the rim.
A comparable phenomenon called the Mississippian Tradition was recognizable by 800 AD
from the Mississippi River to the Appalachians south of the Mason-Dixon line
--no point of origin known, nor is it really necessary
Main area of focus is in the so-called American Bottoms, the broad floodplain created by the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi with several other smaller streams, just east of St. Louis
Cahokia
The major site is Cahokia-now a world heritage site with a major museum. It is a huge site, actually a complex of many mound groups and residential areas.
Though debated, population is estimated to be between 10,000-30,000 people
Originally there were more than 120 mounds, but the locations of only 109 have been
recorded. Many were altered or destroyed by modern farming and urban construction. About
68 are preserved in the historic site boundaries.
The mounds are made entirely of earth. The soil was transported on people's backs in
baskets to the mound construction site. Most mounds show evidence of several construction
stages. The digging left large depressions called borrow pits, which can still be seen in
the area. The Indians moved more than 50 million cubic feet of earth was moved by the
Indians for mound construction alone.
There are three types of mounds.
Monks Mound
The great platform mound at Cahokia -Monks Mound- is the largest Indian Mound north of Mexico and the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World. An estimated 22 million cubic feet of earth composes Monks Mound. It was built in several stages, mostly between A.D. 900 and 1200.
Burial mounds were also important and contained amazing materials.
Mound 72 is one of the most amazing
The Stockade
The center of the city was surrounded by a 2-mile-long stockade - a wall of posts set in trenches, with projecting bastions (guard towers) every 70 feet.
The stockade was constructed four times, and each construction took nearly 20,000 logs.
Built for defense, it would also serve as a social barrier, segregating the more sacred precinct and the elite who lived there. Several sections of the stockade have been reconstructed.
Woodhenge
Archaeological excavations have partially uncovered remains of four, and possibly five,
circular sun calendars that once consisted of large, evenly spaced log posts.
Those calendars, called Woodhenges because of their functional similarity to Stonehenge in England, were probably used to determine the changing seasons and certain ceremonial periods important to an agricultural way of life.
Constructed about A.D. 1000, they were an impressive example of Indian science and engineering
Artifacts
Almost too numerous to list
Ceramics became shell tempered and were 95% utilitarian, plain with simple incising
Other ceramics were grave goods, using animal effigy forms, negative painting, regular paint
Specialists in ceramics, shell work, metal work
Bow and arrow common
Horticultural implements (scapula hoe, antler rakes, etc).
Cahokia is one of many such sites, though most were not as large
On the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Smaller than Cahokia with a central place that is a series of platform mounds around a 100 acre plaza, fortified with a stockade on three sides and the river on the fourth
Dominant mound is 60 feet high, plaza ringed with buildings of varying size and function
Along edges of plaza is a vast cemetery from which more than 3000 burials recovered
--some of the firmest evidence of social stratification
--highest status individuals buried with elaborate artifacts including large copper celts,
finely-made black-filmed incised and engraved pottery
--interred in mounds, but lesser status people with fewer grave goods buried nearby, not
in mounds
It would be erroneous to consider Cahokia or Moundville the only important centers
Others include:
Sites had similar arrangements to that of Cahokia but were certainly not as large.
Debates over what the sites represent continue. Are they spin-offs from larger villages, perhaps even colonies?
Steponaitis (1978) has called them complex chiefdoms by which he means that they had as many as two or three levels of political hierarchy.
Ranking chiefs had control over those of lesser rank who controlled specific territorial or social units.
Cahokia had been abandoned by A.D. 1500, but the Mississippian base was still present at the time of the first European exploration.
Moundville, Etowah (Georgia) and Natchez were still important and it is from the first contact with these chiefdoms that we have our only ethnographic information about some of the complexes.
Clearly, Mississippian tradition contained the bulk (except perhaps, for writing) of
cultural traits that are often considered crucial in definitions of urban culture. It is
becoming increasingly clear that these developments are indigenous to North America with
only limited influences from Mesoamerica.
These indigenous changes occurred more rapidly in some areas than others and certainly urbanization is more apparent in the Eastern Woodlands and the Southeast than elsewhere.
Relatively peripheral, even remote, areas felt the impact of the process.
Dincauze and Hasenstab (1989), consider these impacts on the development of the Iroquois in northeastern North America.
Iroquois responses to Cahokia might have been variable, at times acting as suppliers, or at times refusing to participate, either militantly or defensively.
System may be thought of as a pump, drawing energy (foodstuffs and captives), possibly additional population, commodities (hides , furs, shells, and minerals, and probably information) into the heartland from a large region around it.
The heartland, in turn, sent out manufactured goods (hoes, beads, possibly cloth, other
precious items), ceremonial information (probably related to calendrical rites and
scheduling) and some degree of political control.
This "pump" seems to work as an explanatory model for the Iroquois, but is less
obvious in other areas such as for the village cultures of the Great Plains
On might question how the Mississippian tradition affected the region. Certain connections are apparent, but others are not so clear and questions remain.
Plains
The village cultures of the northern Plains developed in an environmentally less productive climate than that of the Eastern Woodlands.
Culturally the ancestors of the village dwellers reflect the same sorts of cultural traits as their eastern counterparts and at about the same times-ceramics, cultigens, and burial mounds.
Village locations were also similar, that is, on floodplains of rivers such as the Des Moines, Big Sioux, James and, most importantly, the Missouri.
They were involved in the vast trade networks of the eastern cultures, and we see trade goods such as Gulf Coast shells in village middens.
Timing of the developments was also similar, with only a slight temporal lag in the appearance of mounds and ceramics.
Some suggestion that maize arrived earlier in the region than it did in the East.
Population aggregations of a few hundred people develop out of a Woodland base almost simultaneously across the region shortly after A.D. 800 and fluoresce into fortified villages with as many as a thousand people by A.D. 1250 in the Initial Coalescent complex along the Missouri River
The apparent reason the groups didn't develop like those in the Eastern Woodlands seems to be environmental
Climatically the region was unstable and the crops simply couldn't be grown in areas away from the relatively narrow river floodplains.
Population aggregations of a size like those in East simply couldn't be supported. Why then did the Plains cultures show any tendencies toward urbanization at all?
Why did people even live in villages when the more dispersed settlements of the Archaic and early Woodland were an effective response to Plains environmental conditions and stresses?
Why rely on domesticated plants when hunting the large herds of bison might provide more than adequate protein resources (as it did for the later Plains nomadic groups like the Lakota)?
As well, though trade goods and influences of the Mississippian chiefdoms are present, there seems to be no analog to the Iroquoian situation in that the quantity of manufactured goods present in the sites is minimal.
The "pump" as it relates to commodities certainly seems not to work, but I think the answer may lie with transfer of information, not commodities, and the information may not be as complex as that related to ceremony and scheduling.
It may simply be a thirst for information of the outside world.
We have a tendency to assume that somehow the groups on the periphery are "unsophisticated," but it is useful to remember that peoples of North America had been involved in both nomadism and trade systems for millennia before the development of the Mississippian.
When there is contact with the "outside," and especially if the outsider is seen as being technologically superior, there seems to be a desire for the technologies, though not necessarily the accompanying social and ideological structures.
Thus, in many Plains village sites, we see relatively few actual trade items from the Mississippian. Rather, we see many products made in imitation of Mississippian items.
For example, in a Middle Missouri site from the Mill Creek culture of Iowa we see a ceramic vessel made entirely with local paste with incised rattle snakes circling the shoulder of the vessel. Rattlesnakes are extremely rare in the area, but the rattlesnake was a common motif for the Mississippian.
We see the same in other sites, where ceramic motifs from the eastern cultures appear on locally made vessels. Imitation in other industries is not so clear, but probably occurred.
What we see, in other words, is rampant stimulus diffusion.
Intriguing as well is the observation that relatively few items or imitations from the Plains appear in Mississippian sites.
Certainly there might have been trade in perishables such as bison hides but even quantities of non-perishables like stone from the Knife River quarries in North Dakota are rare in core Mississippian sites.
It would appear that both commodity and information flow was largely one-sided.
Certainly these observations are simplistic and largely intuitive notions are presented here, but the precise impacts and relationships between the northwestern periphery and the Mississippian have not been well defined.
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larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
08.20.98