The Mississippian Period

The Mississippian Period, roughly 800 to 1600 AD, was the era of the Mississippian culture, a network of maize-farming, mound-building societies that flourished across much of the midwestern, eastern and southeastern woodlands of North America, identifiable archaeologically by large earthen platform mounds, complex chiefdoms and a shared iconographic tradition known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Its greatest center, Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, grew into a city of an estimated ten to twenty thousand people at its height around 1100, the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, anchored by the massive earthwork now called Monks Mound. Most major Mississippian centers had been abandoned by the time of sustained European contact in the sixteenth century, likely due to some combination of environmental strain, political instability and epidemic disease introduced by early Spanish expeditions, though descendant peoples including the Muscogee, Natchez and Choctaw carried Mississippian traditions into the historic era.