Mound Sites of the Ancient South: A Guide to the Mississippian Chiefdoms

CHAPTER ONE: The Ancient South

1 CHAPTER ONE THE ANCIENT SOUTH What follows is aguidetothelateprehistoricnative peoples of the American South, particularly a group of societies known collectively to scholars as Mississippian chiefdoms. The concept “chiefdom” refers specifically and exclusively to societies characterized by the hereditary transfer of leadership positions and by a social system that included both elites and commoners but that had not reached the size or complexity of a state. The chiefdoms of the Ancient South were dubbed “Mississippian” because their wayoflifefirstdevelopedinthewideMississippiRiverValley,wherethelargestMississippiansitewasbuiltataplacecalledCahokia .TheseMississippian chiefdoms did not conform to popular ideas about Native American life. Mississippian societies were ruled by powerful leaders with the ability to raise armies of warriors from among their followers. They often lived in fortified towns, and they buried their chiefs and other important citizens in earthen mounds surrounded by riches acquired through pillage and longdistance trade. The Mississippians were quite interested in and knowledgeableaboutthemovementsofthestarsandplanets ,andtheybuiltmonuments that were also tools of astronomical observation. Using archaeological information and the accounts of sixteenth-century Spanish explorers, scholars havebeguntounderstandsomethingofthelivesoftheseremarkablepeoples. AlthoughmostAmericanshaveheardofIndiangroupssuchastheCherokee , Choctaw, and Creek, the societies depicted in this book have received almost no attention in the popular media, though to be fair, only in the last few decades have scholars come to understand something of this extinct social order. When the media do depict these societies, they tend to lump them unceremoniously with even earlier societies and refer to them all as “Mound Builders.” Many groups built earthen mounds throughout eastern ifi ll ll ll l ll ll ll ll ll l d l 2 CHAP TER ONE North America during the last few thousand years; however, they can in no way be considered part of one mound-building culture. Piling up earth into symbolically potent creations was merely a widely shared trait. The moundbuilders that we are interested in, the Mississippians, built their mounds for burial and as platforms for elite residences and temples. Their societies were found only in the South and only during the MississippianPeriod ,betweenapproximately900and1600.Thistimeandplacecharacterize what is referred to as the “Ancient South.” Charles Hudson developed the concept of the Ancient South as a complement to the “Old South,” a much more familiar idea referring to the era of slavery and cotton growing beforetheCivilWar.InthemindsofmostAmericans,includingmostsoutherners , this is the “ancient” history of the South. This guide shows, however, that the true beginning of the South as we understand it today began with the rise of the Mississippian chiefdoms. The Mississippians were farmers, just like the Euro-Americans who eventually replaced them across much of the landscape. The same places in the region that were attractive to Mississippians were later attractive to the immigrating Europeans, and for the same reasons. As subsistence farmers, both groups sought the rich soil of the bottomlands in spots that received copious amounts of rain and little frost. Both groups dealt with many of the same problems of cultivation and came to interact with the land in similar ways. Like Mississippian peoples, the newcomers constructed their houses and outbuildings on the highest ground near the fields, sometimes on longabandoned Mississippian mounds, and founded many of their most important towns at old Indian sites. photo, pages xx–1: Sunrise at Moundville. (Laura Shill, University Relations, The University of Alabama) Daily activities depicted in a reconstruction of life in an elite neighborhood adjacent to Monks Mound and the Grand Plaza at Cahokia. (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site) THE ANCIENT SOUTH 3 The similaritiesextended to the kitchen aswell. Mississippians and EuroAmericans grew many of the same foods and prepared them in much the same way. Women in Mississippian societies stewed vegetables until they were soft and limp and cooked nearly everything in animal fat, though they usedbearfatinsteadoflard.By1540,whensouthernIndiansandmembersof theHernandodeSotoexpeditionsatdowntoeatthefirstrecordedbarbecue in the South, the technique had already been a tradition for many hundreds of years. And it is still in use today, of course, though in most cases beef, chicken, and pork have replaced deer, bear, and turkey. In other words, the heritage of the Ancient South is in many ways the heritage of all southerners. Therefore, the responsibility rests on all of us to understand something of it and to enjoy and protect the remains of those once-great southern societies to which we owe so many of the region’s long traditions. An exploration of the Ancient South naturally begins with an examination of the origins of Mississippian societies. The Mississippian Transformation During the ninth and tenth centuries, the majority of peoples...