Early American Cultures

The mound-building tradition of the Americas was a feature of many Native American woodland tribes - including those of the Mississippian culture. Mound building had begun in North America's middle 'Archaic Period' around 3500 BC, when the people who were responsible for the appearance of this practice were still hunter-gatherers.

Their successors throughout the subsequent Woodland period all practiced farming and animal husbandry, and their collective cultures covered the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and its various (many) tributaries, and the Ohio river valley. The people of the non-Mississippian Chacoan culture were also moundbuilders, as were the Chancay people of Peru.

First appearing along the Mississippi River before spreading outwards, the Mississippian was also the last of the mound-building cultures of North America in the mid-western, eastern, and south-eastern United States. Echoes of it lingered for at least a century after its end amongst the tribes which had formed in the wake of its ending.

Cahokia formed the cultural capital of the Mississippian, near what is now Collinsville, Illinois. This was the largest pre-Columbian settlement to the north of the Aztec empire in what is now Mexico - the largest city on North America until Philadelphia in the 1790s. But although it formed the heart of the Mississippian, various regional forms also existed.

Mississippian culture disseminated widely through eastern North America, generally following the river valleys to extend itself or to bump up against similar cultural groups. The Caddoan form evolved in north-western Louisiana, eastern Texas, and south-western Arkansas, evolving out of Woodland period origins.

The Caddoan group in the lower Mississippi valley is distinguished by its elaborate mound-building, sophisticated pottery, hierarchical social structure, and extensive trade networks which linked it to other Mississippian societies. Those trade networks also linked the Caddo people in general to the plains and the south-west, involving bows, hides, pottery, and salt.

Agriculture involved typical Mississippian staples such as intensive maize farming, with diets being supplemented by beans and squash, plus regular hunting. Caddoan settlements were often smaller than those of other Mississippian cultures, and more scattered. Fortifications were more rare (although certainly not unknown), primarily it seems because there was less competition in this region for land and resources.

Mounds were typically flat-topped platforms for burial mounds, temples, or elite residences which were often arranged around open plazas (very similar to those which are to be found in Georgia - see feature link). The Spiro and Battle Mound sites are prominent examples. Conical burial mounds could also be built over dismantled buildings as ordered by the ruling elite. That elite often enjoyed burials with exotic grave goods.

Leadership was generally in the hands of males, although women could on occasion wield significant power and qualified descent for leadership was matrilineal. Each Caddoan society was led by a hereditary chief who was known as the caddi, with levels of rank below that in a strict hierarchical ordering. Both sexes practised body decoration which included jewellery, piercings, and tattoos.

The Caddo adopted many elements of the South-Eastern Ceremonial Complex (or SECC), a shared expression of cultural practices which also involved the South Appalachian culture without forming a cultural expression of its own. Caddoan expressions of the SECC were distinct, with them sometimes focussing on a specific sub-grouping known as the 'Earth Cult' rather than another which is known as the 'Southern Cult'.

The Caddoan culture broke up by about 1400, but the Caddo people continued to focus around the same tribal groupings. These principally concentrated around three loosely-affiliated confederacies when Caddoan descendants first meet Europeans: the Haisinai of what became areas of eastern Texas, the Natchitoches of later northern Louisiana, and the Kadohadacho of what is now the border of Texas, largely in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Alice Kehoe has argued that the Mississippians had close trade and communications links with the civilisations of Mesoamerica (such as the Mayas, Aztecs, and their predecessors and contemporaries), and that this link is readily apparent in the archaeological record (see feature link for more on this).

The rest of Mississippian culture consisted of urban settlements (none of which were as large as Cahokia) and primitive suburban areas around them. The overall cultural start and end dates are not set in stone - there is some elasticity due to the regional variations.

The Americas

Early Cultures

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