Mississippian History

About 800 AD, the old Hopewell people seem to have developed what we call the Mississippian culture. People living near the Mississippi river got new kinds of corn about this time. Now, instead of just building burial mounds, people built mounds with flat tops and built buildings on top of the mounds, like a Mayan temple. Some of these buildings were temples for the gods, and others were for rich, powerful families to live in. They lived in bigger towns, instead of small villages, and these towns also started to look more like Mayan towns. On the other hand, people seem to have lost interest in building big burial mounds.

These Mississippian people seem to have been powerful, so that they were able to take over a lot of the land near them, and build more towns with more mounds and temples. When they were at their most powerful, about 1200 to 1500 AD, they controlled land from Wisconsin to Tennessee and Florida.
But in the Late Mississippian period, beginning about 1400 AD, people seem to have been fighting a lot of wars with each other. Some towns were abandoned, and others built fortification walls. This was the situation when Spanish invaders first landed in Florida just after 1500 AD.

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