Look Upon the Great Mound: Pre-1492

A dozen miles from the little town of Noxapater in east central Mississippi stands the ancient Indian mound of Nanih Waiya. The Choctaw people have always considered the large platform mound sacred, calling it their ishki chito, or “great mother.” According to one tale of origin, “In the very center of the mound, they say, ages ago, the Great Spirit created the first Choctaws, and through a hole or cave, they crawled forth into the light of day.”

Another story tells how the Choctaws, after wandering many years in search of a home, settled near the Pearl River and erected a burial mound over the bones of their ancestors, which they had been carrying with them. “Behold the wonderful work of our hands; and let us be glad,” they sang, after years of incessant labor. “Look upon the great mound; its top is above the trees, and its black shadow lies on the ground, [stretching as far as] a bowshot. [Here lie] the bones of fathers and relatives; they ...died in a far off wild country Our journey lasted many winters; it ends at Nanih Waiya.”

During the 1800s, when citizens of the new United States first pushed west across the Mississippi Valley in great numbers, white settlers were amazed by the size and quantity of ancient mounds like Nanih Waiya that dotted the landscape. Most refused to believe that these great earthworks could have been built by the ancestors of the Indians whom they were fighting for control of America’s heartland. Instead, they devised elaborate and mistaken myths about ancient races from Europe who might have been clever enough to create such monuments.

At the same time, settlers tore down many mounds as obstacles to progress, obliterating evidence of early Indian life. On the rare occasions when the newcomers did gather up artifacts from the surface, it was done randomly, with no attention to the “context” which might have fostered further investigation.

Only in the past century has it become possible to collect and examine evidence of the continent’s earliest inhabitants in a truly systematic way. Indeed, the study of North America’s oldest residents remains in its infancy. In the South, archaeologists have unearthed artifacts from four distinct prehistoric periods — Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian — stretching back 12,000 years before the arrival of Europeans and Africans from across the Atlantic. Although there is still much to be learned, the initial evidence provides a glimpse of the rich and varied cultures that thrived among the diverse peoples who have lived in America since the end of the Ice Age.

In the Beginning

Where did the first Southerners come from, and when did they arrive? Asia is now accepted as the source of the earliest Americans. Physical anthropologists, who compare human groups around the world, find similarities between the hair, skin color, blood types, and teeth of the inhabitants of Siberia and America. Both North Asians and Native Americans, for example, tend to have “shoveled incisors” —upper-biting teeth that have a scooped-out shape different from those of other peoples. Experts say this characteristic first appeared in the Asian population 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, so people from Siberia traveling to America must have come after that time.

The last great Ice Age occurred from roughly 70,000 to 10,000 years ago, and at least twice during that time — once 50,000 to 40,000 years ago and again 28,000 to 10,000 years ago — lower sea levels exposed a land bridge in the Bering Strait linking Siberia to Alaska. Over the past century experts have come to agree that humans were widespread throughout the Americas before the end of this second opening.

One dramatic proof is that archaeologists have found handmade spear points embedded in the bones of large animals known to have become extinct at least 9,000 years ago. Also, modern carbon-14 dating procedures allow scientists to estimate with growing accuracy the age of any charred material, such as wood burned in an ancient campfire, and such evidence confirms human activity in America at least 12,000 years ago.

Could initial arrival have taken place well before then? Recently some experts have said, “Yes... maybe.” They speculate that diverse stone objects, such as those gathered recently at the Meadowcroft rock shelter in Pennsylvania, seem to date from much earlier. But few such artifacts have been found in a context that would allow precise dating, and some are thought to be the product of natural geological forces, not human craftsmanship. Doubters also point out that no convincing human remains have been discovered in America from that earlier time.

Still, the probable date for America’s human beginnings has been pushed back steadily in recent generations, and it may soon be pushed back further. In February scholars announced that they had discovered human fingerprints and charred materials in a New Mexico cave that seem to date from 28,000 years ago, according to carbon-dating estimates.

Whatever happened in earlier times, it is clear that roughly 12,000 years ago, as the global climate shifted, bands of hunters now known as Paleo-Indians moved southward from what is now Alaska. As they emerged into the heartland of North America they encountered an abundance of Ice Age “megafauna,” herds of large mammals that had never faced human attack or learned to fear it. Mastodons and mammoths, ancient bison and horses, even camels — perhaps as many as 100 million animals in all — were hunted to extinction in less than a thousand years. If human beings, and not the rapidly changing climate, were primarily responsible for this decimation, then it constituted North America’s first man-made ecological disaster, and the largest one to date. Pursuing receding herds, searching for new quarry, and perhaps seeking warmer climates, these big-game hunters fanned out rapidly across all of North America. Within a few centuries, some had reached the region now composed of the southern United States — a land that proved to be a hospitable home. “In these early Indians,” explains anthropologist Dean Snow, “we have one of the thinnest and most mobile human populations ever, scattered through one of the richest environments a hunting culture could hope to find.”

In the South, evidence regarding these first inhabitants has turned up in unlikely places. At Little Salt Spring southeast of Sarasota, underwater archaeologist Carl Clausen has explored an hourglass-shaped sink hole that was a source of water in the arid climate of Ice Age Florida. The water level then was well below the waist of the hourglass, almost 90 feet below its present depth. While scuba diving at this lower level, Clausen found the shell of a large tortoise resting upon fire-baked clay. When carbon-dating of a charred stake suggested an age of 12,000 years, the diver surmised that a Paleo-Indian might have fallen into the mineral spring; unable to climb out through the narrow opening above, the hunter could have speared the tortoise and roasted it while trying to stay alive on the ledge.

Other hunters settled in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where they found outcrops of jasper, a dark green quartz well suited for spear points. Known as Clovis points after the site in New Mexico where they were first discovered in the 1920s, these delicate implements, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel, were created by hand through “pressure-flaking.” Found widely throughout eastern North America, Clovis points represent a very high level of stone-chipping technology. The slender blades were more finely crafted than necessary for killing large animals, and are therefore regarded not only as efficient tools but as impressive works of art. Archaeologists at Flint Run near Front Royal, Virginia have discovered waste chips left by skilled “knappers” who handcrafted these razor-sharp stone points some 11,500 years ago. In the same area, excavations have revealed other evidence regarding these First Families of Virginia: faint traces of upright wooden posts that suggest the oldest human structures known in North America.

Settling Down

As the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, the mastodons and other large beasts that had adapted to the cold weather began to disappear. Whether they were killed off by the climatic shift or by the Clovis spears of the Paleo-Indians, their extinction forced successive generations of hunters to turn to pursuing small animals, fishing, and gathering acorns, hickory nuts, and other forest products. Gradually, the hunting culture of the Paleo-Indians gave way to an era called the Archaic Period.

To sustain their changing lifestyle, Archaic Indians developed a new array of tools — grooved axes, mortars and pestles of polished stone, fish hooks and needles carved from bone. They devised a spear-thrower or atlatl for hunting deer and other game, and they began to create simple fiber-tempered pottery, in which strands of grass or Spanish moss were mixed into the clay to strengthen it during firing.

Archaic groups were more settled and more numerous than their predecessors, and exploited wild foods more intensively. They were also more widespread, adapting to inland and coastal regions. Inside Russell Cave near the Tennessee River in north east Alabama, excavations begun in 1953 penetrated successive levels of ancient debris to a depth of 14 feet. The lowest layers revealed that Archaic hunters took shelter here as far back as 8,500 years ago. Farther north on an old channel of the lower Tennessee River, the Eva site shows occupation beginning 7,000 years ago. Besides hunting deer and gathering nuts much as their counterparts in the forests of Europe were doing at the time, the Eva inhabitants also used fresh-water mussels for several millennia, leaving behind an enormous “midden” or refuse heap of leftover shells that was characteristic of Archaic settlements. At Stallings Island on the Savannah River near Augusta, Georgia, a huge shell midden 1,500 feet long and 12 feet thick has yielded fiber-tempered pottery dating back 4,000 years — about the time Stonehenge was at its height in ancient England. Pots with more elaborate decorations, nearly as old or older, have been found in another extensive midden on the St. Johns River in Florida.

As the centuries passed, the steady changes of the Archaic Period led to significantly new patterns of life in the South. By 3,000 years ago, native communities had begun to farm small plots of land, trade with their neighbors, and build huge mounds. The earliest large mounds appear at Poverty Point in northeast Louisiana, an impressive and puzzling settlement that illustrates the transition from Archaic culture to an era known as the Woodland Period.

Founded between 1500 and 1200 BC — when Thebes was a center of power in ancient Egypt — Poverty Point went virtually unexplored until 1953, when an archaeologist reviewing aerial photographs taken by Army mapmakers noticed six concentric ridges laid out in an octagonal pattern. Excavations revealed that while the original inhabitants had depended on the spear-throwers and fiber-tempered pots of the Archaic Period, they had also become active traders and developed a complex ritual life. Much about their settlement remains a mystery, including the exact use of thousands of “Poverty Point objects,” small balls of fired clay that may have been used to line cooking pits in a floodplain where few stones were available.

Increasingly, people of the Woodland era settled along the rich “bottomland” created by Southern rivers. They not only collected the seeds of common plants such as pigweed, giant ragweed, and canary grass, they also began to cultivate sunflowers and sumpweed. Seeds from all these plants have been found, for example, in the cool atmosphere of Mammoth Cave and nearby Salts Cave, north of Bowling Green, Kentucky, where Indians gathered gypsum crystals from cave walls. Though some of the most revealing Woodland artifacts have been carried off by curious amateurs, many have been preserved, including feather blankets, strips of rough cloth, and a sandal woven from the inner bark of a pawpaw tree. Surviving squash rinds indicate that several members of the “cucurbit” family, long domesticated in Mexico, had made their way into the South, where they have flourished ever since: Bottle gourds provided excellent containers, and squash expanded the diet.

As experience made Indians ever more adept at gathering and preserving the bountiful nuts and fruits of the Southern forest, they became more sedentary. Underground storage pits protected a surplus of acorns, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, beechnuts, butternuts, and hickory nuts; persimmons, pawpaws, grapes, and berries of all kinds were harvested in season.

As subsistence became easier, time for artistic work and building projects increased. Pottery, now tempered with shell or grit instead of fiber, became more widespread, and it was decorated by pressing cords, fabric, or carved stamps into the soft clay. Prominent persons adorned themselves with gorgets and pearls, placed decorative “spools” in slits in their ears, and smoked carefully carved pipes shaped like tubes, or flat platforms topped with a small bowl in the form of a crouching person or animal.

Jewelry and pipes were preserved in extensive burial mounds, along with a wide array of trade items such as seashells and fossilized shark teeth from coastal areas, or mica and obsidian from distant mountain ranges. Elaborate “effigy mounds” in the shapes of birds and snakes also began to appear. At the Rock Eagle Effigy Mound at Eatonton, Georgia, Woodland workers carried thousands of white quartz rocks a considerable distance and piled them six to eight feet high. Over the years, they shaped an enormous buzzard, or eagle, with a wingspan of 120 feet, the purpose or meaning of which remains unknown. Equally difficult to interpret is the “Old Stone Fort,” 4,600 feet of stone-and earth wall constructed nearly 2,000 years ago on a bluff above Duck River near the town of Manchester in central Tennessee.

The Mississippians

Between 700 and 800 AD, as Europe was entering the Middle Ages, a social and economic revolution began changing Native American life in much of the South. Known as the Mississippian transformation, this shift began in the Mississippi Valley and spread in all directions, surviving in Natchez until about 1700.

The new way of life was characterized by the cultivation of corn, the ranking of people in society, and the erection of large ceremonial mounds. Its best-known center was at Cahokia, located across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis. Recently designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations, the complex includes the largest Indian mound in North America, a ceremonial pyramid rising more than 100 feet above the floodplain and containing nearly 22 million cubic feet of earth. During its heyday between 1050 and 1250 AD, Cahokia was home to well over 10,000 people, an unprecedented concentration for the time.

While the cultivation of maize cannot be said to have caused the Mississippian transformation, it undoubtedly played a major role. Woodland farmers had acquired tropical flint corn from Mexico around 200 BC, but this small-eared variety required a long, dry growing season. When the Southern climate became slightly wetter and cooler after 400 AD, corn virtually disappeared from the Mississippi Valley for more than four centuries.

When the crop reappeared, it was augmented by a new variety called eastern flint from the mountains of Guatemala. This hardy strain provided larger ears and was well suited to the relatively cooler climate of North America, where it was in wide use by the 13th century.

The cultivation of beans began at about the same time, and together corn and beans proved to be a nutritional combination. But there were costs. Corn consumed valuable soil nutrients, forcing its growers to cultivate rich alluvial bottomland or regularly clear new fields. Preparing the land, weeding the fields, and harvesting the crop all demanded considerable labor and organization.

The spread of corn was thus accompanied by a fundamental shift in Southern social structures. Egalitarian tribal societies organized around kinship gave way to more centralized chiefdoms, based upon hierarchy and deference. An elite emerged, separated from the common people. Leaders occupied exclusive mound-top residences and received burial in elaborate mounds. A few “paramount chiefdoms” gained dominance over their neighbors, though efforts at centralized control generally proved unstable and short-lived.

Expanded military organizations enforced internal social controls and built substantial fortifications against nearby enemies. A defensive palisade can be seen at Moundville, a 300-acre state monument on the Black Warrior River south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This major Mississippian community was second only to Cahokia in size, with 20 flat-topped mounds spread around a central plaza. Several artificial ponds created by digging earth for the mounds may have been used to stock fish for a population of at least 3,000 people. Built around 1200 AD, the community was still thriving a century later, when Cahokia had begun its decline. It has yielded rich finds to archaeologists, including engraved discs, copper pendants, shell gorgets, delicate pottery, and an axe and handle carved from a single stone.

The Southern Cult

Similar sacred objects and symbolic designs of Mississippian culture have been found throughout the South, suggesting shared ritual practices and religious beliefs. These common traits, described as the Southern Cult or the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, include pictures of human skulls, feathered serpents, faces with forked designs around the eyes, and hands with an eye in the palm. Mississippian warriors apparently spread the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex through their clashes with other settlements. Indeed, many common symbols found across the region relate to war. The forked-eye design, for example, was based on the eye markings of the peregrine falcon—perhaps the most spectacular bird of prey, notable for its ability to dive at speeds of over 100 miles an hour and strike its quarry on the wing, killing birds twice its own size.

Such symbols of Mississippian culture spread outward from the Mississippi Valley in all directions. To the west, the Spiro mound in eastern Oklahoma contained a rich trove of Mississippian artifacts, and some aspects of Mississippian culture reached the Caddoan peoples of Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas.

To the east, Emerald Mound in Mississippi represents one of the largest temple mounds in the United States. Mississippian culture also spread to the Etowah site north of Atlanta, to the Lake Jackson site near Tallahassee, and to the Mulberry site on the Wateree River near Camden, South Carolina.

In a few instances the Mississippian expansion proceeded by an actual migration of people. At the Ocmulgee site at Macon, Georgia, newcomers who pushed eastward beyond the Appalachian mountains around 900 AD built a large earthlodge which has now been reconstructed.

Perhaps the latest and clearest example of migration occurred around 1300 AD, when a group of Mississippian peoples from farther south and west pushed into the area around Town Creek on a tributary of the Pee Dee River near Mount Gilead, North Carolina. There they planted corn and built a ceremonial mound and temple, fortified by a strong palisade. But local people apparently resisted the Mississippian expansion, struggling to preserve their local culture. The Town Creek settlement was abandoned after little more than 100 years.

Even as the Mississippian newcomers to Town Creek were withdrawing, however, forces were at work in Europe and Africa that would prompt an unprecedented era of oceanic exploration. Soon two very old worlds on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each unknown to the other, would come into direct and lasting contact. A complex Southern world that had evolved gradually over more than 100 centuries would be violently and irrevocably altered in the five short centuries to come.