Mississippian culture
The Mississippian culture were collections of Native American societies that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 to 1600 CE, varying regionally.
Almost all dated Mississippian sites predate 1539–1540 (when Hernando de Soto explored the area),[4] with notable exceptions being Natchez communities.
Sites in this area often contain large ceremonial platform mounds, residential complexes and are often encircled by earthen ditches and ramparts or palisades.
[11] Middle Mississippian cultures, especially the Cahokia polity located near East St. Louis, Illinois, were very influential on neighboring societies.
High-status artifacts, including stone statuary and elite pottery associated with Cahokia, have been found far outside of the Middle Mississippian area.
The term South Appalachian Province was originally used by W. H. Holmes in 1903 to describe a regional ceramic style in the southeast involving surface decorations applied with a carved wooden paddle.
[11] Typical settlements were located on riverine floodplains and included villages with defensive palisades enclosing platform mounds and residential areas.
Villages with single platform mounds were more typical of the river valley settlements throughout the mountainous area of southwest North and South Carolina and southeastern Tennessee that were known as the historic Cherokee homelands.
In Western North Carolina for example, some 50 such mound sites in the eleven westernmost counties have been identified since the late 20th century, following increased research in this area of the Cherokee homeland.
Hernando de Soto led an expedition into the area in the early 1540s, he encountered several native groups now thought to have been Caddoan.
Mississippian peoples were ancestral to the majority of the American Indian nations living in this region when European trade began.
[citation needed] Scholars have studied the records of Hernando de Soto's expedition of 1539–1543 to learn of his contacts with Mississippians, as he traveled through their villages of the Southeast.
The chronicles of de Soto are among the first documents written about Mississippian peoples and are an invaluable source of information on their cultural practices.
Because the natives lacked immunity to infectious diseases unknowingly carried by the Europeans, such as measles and smallpox, epidemics caused so many fatalities that they undermined the social order of many chiefdoms.
[24] Other Native American groups, having migrated many hundreds of miles and lost their elders to diseases, did not know their ancestors had built the mounds dotting the landscape.
