The Classic Mississippian Culture

The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American civilization that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 to 1600, varying regionally. Composed of series of urban settlements and villages (the largest city being Cahokia) and linked together by a loose trading network.

The Mississippians had no writing system or stone architecture. They worked naturally occurring metal deposits, such as hammering and annealing copper for ritual objects like Mississippian copper plates and other decorations, but did not smelt iron or practice bronze metallurgy.

The term Middle Mississippian is also used to describe the core of the classic Mississippian culture area. This area
Houses were built around the plaza and were often arranged around small courtyards that probably served the households of several related families. Some, though not all, Mississippian villages also had defensive structures. Usually these took the form of a pole wall, known as a palisade; sometimes there was a ditch immediately outside the wall. These helped to keep unwelcome people and animals from entering the village.

Mississippian towns containing one or more mounds served as the capitals of chiefdoms. Historical and archaeological information shows that mounds were closely associated with Mississippian chiefs. Only chiefs built their houses and placed temples to their ancestors on mounds, conducted rituals from the summits of mounds, and buried their ancestors within mounds. Linguistic evidence suggests that mounds actually may have been symbols representing the earth. By using mounds as they did, Mississippian chiefs explicitly reminded their followers of their dominance over the earthly
1350-1600), the large chiefdoms of the Middle Mississippian had broken apart into smaller chiefdoms Hernando de Sotowhose centers were evenly distributed across Georgia's river valleys. Near the end of this period, from 1539 to 1543, Hernando de Soto and his army of Spaniards traveled through the Southeast in search of riches. Descriptions left behind by some of de Soto's men tell of powerful chiefs ruling over territories that stretched for hundreds of miles. Historical and archaeological studies have identified these as paramount chiefdoms. Paramount chiefdoms were loosely united confederacies of individual chiefdoms spread over large areas. The paramount chiefdom of Coosa, described by one de Soto chronicler, had as many as seven smaller chiefdoms, all under the influence of a powerful chief living at the town also known as