Mississippian North American History
(Click here to go back to the Woodland period)
Mississippian period
After 800 AD the Mississippian culture developed all
along the Mississippi and the Missouri valleys. Now many people lived in
towns. They built temples and palaces on top of big earth mounds. They had
wooden fortification walls around their towns, with walkways at the top.
Like the Hopewell people, the Mississippian
people also traded and traveled using the rivers, especially the Mississippi
river. But the Mississippian people did grow corn,
and they lived mainly on corn, beans,
and squash. They built bigger mounds than the Hopewell people, too, and
like the Maya
in Central America they built buildings on top of their mounds - temples
to their gods, and palaces for people to live in, and meeting houses.
Further east, the Cherokee people also began to live in towns and villages and farm a lot of their food, and traded up and down the rivers. In the north, at the headwaters of the Mississippi basin, the Cree and the Sioux continued to gather wild rice, though they too built burial mounds.
A global warming period which began around 1000 AD and lasted until 1300 AD caused a lot of people to look for a better place to live during this time. The Inuit moved south from the Arctic circle into Labrador. The Vikings left Greenland entirely and moved back to Iceland and Scandinavia. The Iroquois moved north along the Susquehanna river (from modern Maryland to modern New York State and Canada). The Pueblo people in the south-west left their towns in northern Arizona and Colorado about 1200-1300 AD and moved south.
Not everyone in North America lived in towns and farmed at this time. Some people who lived in the north, like the Iroquois, kept on living in a Late Woodland culture until they met Europeans in the 1500's. The Algonquin, the Sioux, and the Cree, further north than the Iroquois, remained in a Late Archaic culture into the 1500's. On the northern Pacific coast, the Chinook were living in a Late Archaic culture into the 1700's AD. In the far north, the Inuit were living in a Middle Archaic way into the 1900's AD.
Further east, the Cherokee people also began to live in towns and villages and farm a lot of their food, and traded up and down the rivers. In the north, at the headwaters of the Mississippi basin, the Cree and the Sioux continued to gather wild rice, though they too built burial mounds.
A global warming period which began around 1000 AD and lasted until 1300 AD caused a lot of people to look for a better place to live during this time. The Inuit moved south from the Arctic circle into Labrador. The Vikings left Greenland entirely and moved back to Iceland and Scandinavia. The Iroquois moved north along the Susquehanna river (from modern Maryland to modern New York State and Canada). The Pueblo people in the south-west left their towns in northern Arizona and Colorado about 1200-1300 AD and moved south.
Not everyone in North America lived in towns and farmed at this time. Some people who lived in the north, like the Iroquois, kept on living in a Late Woodland culture until they met Europeans in the 1500's. The Algonquin, the Sioux, and the Cree, further north than the Iroquois, remained in a Late Archaic culture into the 1500's. On the northern Pacific coast, the Chinook were living in a Late Archaic culture into the 1700's AD. In the far north, the Inuit were living in a Middle Archaic way into the 1900's AD.
And the people who moved to the Great Plains, like the
Navajo, the Blackfoot,
and the Ute, mostly didn't start farming, because
the grasslands would not support
the kind of farming they knew how to do. Instead, they got most of their
food from buffalo hunting. They
traveled from one place to another as nomads
following the buffalo, carrying their things and using dogs
to pull a travois with their tipi
on it.
After the warming period, about 1350 AD, there was a
global cooling period known as the Little Ice Age. Other people moved around
during this time. For instance, the Navajo and
the Apache moved south out of Canada into the southern Great Plains at this
time. The Mississippian and Cherokee
people didn't move anywhere. But around 1400 AD, something does seem to
have changed in the Mississippi Valley. People stopped building mounds,
and a lot of the bigger towns seem half-abandoned. People seem to have moved
out to the countryside, maybe doing more hunting
and gathering and less farming.
This might be because of the warming period, or it might be a political
collapse, or something else. In any case, at the time that the first
Spanish explorers arrived in North America, around 1500 AD, people were
not very well prepared to fight them off.
To find out more about North American history before 1500, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
North American
history after 1500 AD
Early North American Government
Main North America page
Main South America page
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