The Mississippian Period: Chiefs, Rank, and Ceremony
Who the Mississippians were, how chiefdoms and social rank worked, and what we know about their ceremonies. This excerpt uses the opening of the article and the section “Social Organization, Moundbuilding, and Decorative Art,” except for its paragraph on mounds. It leaves out the sections on daily life and on the end of the Mississippian tradition.
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Mississippian Peoples
The Mississippian period (1000-1550 CE) was a new way of life for Native Americans in what is now the midwestern and southeastern United States. Before this time, people in those regions gathered wild foods. They added produce from small garden plots. Most communities were small. About 1,000 years ago, this older way of life changed as communities grew larger. Mississippian culture was not a single “tribe.” It was many societies that shared a similar way of life, or tradition. Mississippian peoples lived in fortified towns or small homesteads. They grew corn, built large earthen mounds, and kept up trade networks. They had powerful leaders and shared similar symbols and rituals. The term “Mississippian” comes from the Mississippi River Valley, where the tradition first developed. Through borrowed ideas and the movement of people, this new tradition spread across the Southeast. It appeared in what is now Alabama around 1100 CE. The Mississippians left no written record. So what we know of this time has been learned through archaeology.
The Mississippian tradition arose after people began putting more effort into growing corn. This gave them a surplus of food that could be stored. It allowed populations to grow. Settlements tended to gather in river valleys, with their good soils and plentiful wild foods. Larger communities brought new kinds of cooperation and competition. As a result of these changes, some people gained power or influence over others.
Social Organization and Moundbuilding
Archaeologists believe that the Mississippian peoples were organized into chiefdoms. A chiefdom is a form of political organization united under an official leader, or “chief.” Chiefdom societies were organized by families of different social rank, or status. People in chiefdoms inherited their rank at birth. But they could gain prestige through personal achievement, as historical evidence shows.
First, accounts of Mississippians in Alabama were written by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. They suggest that chiefdoms existed at that time. These accounts mention powerful chiefs living in large capital towns. The towns were marked by earthen mounds and protected by wooden palisades. Less powerful chiefs in smaller nearby settlements paid tribute to their capital town. Second, archaeologists have found that prehistoric Mississippians had a similar pattern of settlement. For example, the Moundville site was a large, fortified capital town with many mounds. It was surrounded by smaller, one-mound sites.
Third, differences in burial location and grave goods show levels of social rank and inheritance. At Moundville in west-central Alabama, most people were buried in cemeteries near their houses. Their graves held a few common tools or nothing at all. But certain people, including some children, were buried in mounds. Rare copper and shell ornaments and fancy pottery were buried with them. These children were too young to have earned their high status. So they must have inherited it. A few mound burials held adult skeletons buried with copper axes. The axes were purely symbolic, because they were too soft to work as tools. They are not found in other Moundville burials. So archaeologists think these people were high-ranking chiefs. But power in these societies had limits. High-ranking people were no healthier than common people. There is no evidence for a class of full-time artisans or merchants separate from food producers. The Mississippians lived in towns led by chiefs, not in cities ruled by kings and queens.
Religion and Ceremony
Our knowledge of Mississippian religious and ceremonial life is limited. Weapons are common images on artifacts. Copper ornaments, shell pendants, and pottery vessels show clubs, axes, arrows, severed heads, skulls, bones, and scalps. Some images show falcons, human-falcon beings, warriors, and monsters such as winged snakes. Some pottery vessels were made in the shape of animals such as frogs, fish, and birds. The pottery heads and tails served as pot handles. Humans are also shown, such as a mother-with-child theme or “head pots” showing a dead person or spirit. The decorative arts stood for ideas and values that were important to Mississippian peoples. The Mississippians clearly cared about universal themes such as life, death, fertility, ancestors, war, mythic beings, and heroes.