Plaquemine culture
[1] They were primarily agriculturists who grew maize, pumpkins, squash, beans and tobacco but they also hunted, fished, and gathered wild plants.
[7] Beginning during the Terminal Coles Creek period (1150 to 1250 CE), Mississippian cultures far upstream from the Plaquemine area began expanding their reach southward.
Excavations in the Yazoo Basin area of Mississippi have shown a Cahokia Horizon as extra-regional exotic goods, such as Cahokian pottery and other artifacts, began to be deposited in Coles Creek-Plaquemine culture sites.
[10] Through repeated contacts, groups in Mississippi and then Louisiana began adopting Mississippian techniques for making pottery, as well as ceremonial objects and possibly social structuring.
[11] By the mid 15th century influences from Pensacola culture peoples (from the Bottle Creek site on the Gulf Coast near Mobile) had begun spreading westward across Barataria Bay and the Atchafalaya Basin and by 1700 had Mississipianized the local populations as far north as modern day Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
By this point the expedition had been traversing the southeast for several years and accounts of their deplorable treatment of the indigenous populations would have been known by groups they had yet to contact in person.
When the remnants of de Sotos expedition finally made it down the river past Quigualtam they encountered below it another unnamed but powerful chiefdom; who also gave chase until the foreigners had left their territory.
Historian Charles M. Hudson has suggested that Quigualtam was centered on the area surrounding the Holly Bluff or Winterville sites in the lower Yazoo Basin.
[16] Others have put forward the Glass site; which is on the flood plain in between the Mississippi River and the Natchez Bluffs approximately 9.5 kilometres (5.9 mi) south of Vicksburg.
On top of this the intrusion of Europeans had upset the delicate political balance between native groups who had existed in a state of endemic warfare between polities for generations.
[21][17][18][19][20] The post de Soto entrada Transylvania Phase (1550-1700 CE) of the Tensas Basin saw the increasing spread of Mississippian influences diffusing southward from Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi into traditional Plaquemine territory.
[22] The Jordan Mounds site on a relict channel of the Arkansas River in northeastern Louisianas Morehouse Parish was constructed during the protohistoric period between 1540 and 1685.
Cultural trappings including societal organization, language and pottery styles in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early historic period bear this out.
[24] This pattern of plazas flanked by mounds with temples, elite residences and mortuary structures at their summits was inherited from their Troyville and Coles Creek culture ancestors, and was a village arrangement widely employed throughout the southeast.
[3] Like other Native Americans in the southeast this open plaza area would have been used for public rituals and functions such as the Green Corn Ceremony and games such as chunkey and the ballgame.
They sometimes added small solid handles called lugs and textured the surface by brushing clumps of grass over the vessel before it was fired.
