The Americas

Plaquemine Culture (Mississippian) (North America)
c.AD 1200 - 1700

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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 Plaquemine form evolved late by Mississippian standards in eastern and southern Louisiana and western Mississippi to succeed the Coles Creek culture.

A good example of this culture is provided by Emerald Mound, a Plaquemine Mississippian-period archaeological site which is located on the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton, Mississippi. The site dates from about 1200-1730, and is the second-largest pre-Columbian earthwork in the USA, after Monks Mound at Cahokia. The culture's type site is Medora in Louisiana (near the town of Plaquemine), while other examples include the Anna, Holly Bluff, and Winterville sites in Mississippi.

Archaeological finds are constantly being made, and archaeological cultures are frequently being updated with new information. Get in touch here if this page also requires updating.

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(Information by Mick Baker and Peter Kessler, with additional information from Osage Texts and Cahokia Data, Alice B Kehoe (2007), from Wind Jewels and Paddling Gods: The Mississippian Southeast in the Postclassic Mesoamerican World, Alice B Kehoe (2005), Mississippian Period: Overview, Adam King (New Georgia Encyclopaedia, 2002), from Coles Creek Antecedents of Plaquemine Mound Construction, Lori Roe (Plaquemine Archaeology, Mark A Rees & Patrick C Livingood (Eds), University of Alabama Press, pp 20-37, 2007), and from External Links: Mississippian Period (Encyclopaedia of Alabama), and Study challenges the narrative of Cahokia's abandonment (Heritage Daily), and Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: An Encyclopaedia, Guy Gibbon (Garland Publishing, 1998, and available to a limited extent via the Internet Archive).)

c.AD 1200

The transition from late Woodland to early Mississippian is complete by this time, when the Plaquemine culture appears. It has developed out of the Coles Creek culture to become prominent in the lower Mississippi river valley.

The Mississippian culture and its related neighbours essentially had Cahokia as their capital, this being the largest pre-Columbian settlement to the north of the Aztec empire (click or tap on map to view full sized)

For the Mississippian as a whole, the start now of the 'Middle Mississippian' shows it reaching its peak even despite problems in Cahokia which are related to failed rains and subsequent crop failure.

Regional chiefdoms are at their most evolved, with traits which have been developed at Cahokia being disseminated throughout the entire culture. Palisades are beginning to appear, but ceremonial complexes are still being built and centrally-produced pottery is being copied on a local basis.

c.1300 - 1400

There is evidence of killings, possibly executions in the Mississippian centre of Cahokia in the 1200s. It would seem that the increasing instability of the rains and the resultant food shortages have triggered some form of civil war which ultimately destroys this civilisation.

Cahokia is known as the mound-building city, after the Mississippian culture to which it belonged between AD 600-1400 until collapse occurred due to several external factors and a few subsequent internal factors too

The 'Late Mississippian' is a period of decline. By 1300 Cahokia is a ghost town. A second massive flooding event takes place between 1340-1460, which probably helps to terminate the already-fading Mississippian culture itself.

Cultural and even language traits survive in many former Mississippian groups, however. The Plaquemine people continue to thrive in their Louisiana homeland even while their cultural territory shrinks southwards towards the southern Natchez Bluffs area. Relinquished areas still follow late Plaquemine practices in general but on a more basic scale and with less of the trappings of a more highly-civilised society.

Mound A at the Plaquemine culture site of Winterville, which still contains twelve of its original twenty-three mounds and two large plazas, since AD 2000 cared for by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

1542

Hernando de Soto had arrived in the Spanish Colonies with Pedrarias Davila, first governor of Panama, in 1514. Then, in 1533, he had served as one of Francisco Pizarro's captains during the conquest of Peru.

In 1538 he is given the governorship of Cuba and is charged with the task of colonising the North American continent for Spain within four years (territory which later forms part of the modern United States).

He leads the first European expedition deep into the territory of North America where, in a great arcing journey, he traverses Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi (where he is effectvely chased out of town by the Natchez locals), and Arkansas. After encountering ever greater difficulties, de Soto dies of a fever on 21 May 1542.

Juan Ponce de Leon was the first governor of the Spanish imperial colony of Florida, but he was also its first major casualty thanks to intransigent natives

c.1700

Plaquemine culture has outlived the Mississippian by up to three hundred years, with an approximate end at about 1700. Its territory has shrunk southwards and its people have been decimated by European epidemics brought in both by the De Soto expedition of 1542 and by contact with other Native Americans who have been infected by Europeans.

As Plaquemine descendant groups coalesce and disperse into the Native American tribes which exist to greet the Europeans in the next three centuries, many former Plaquemine and Mississippian traits are recorded, principally by a New France which has already laid claim to their entire territory.

Although sometimes not accepted by absolutely all modern commentators, the bulk of late Plaquemine-period people devolve into clear tribal groups, primarily in the form of the Natchez and related Taensa tribes.

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle ('Lord of the Manor'), explored the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico in 1669-1670, and claimed the entire Mississippi basin for New France