The first peoples to inhabit what today is the southeastern United States sustained
themselves as hunters and gatherers. Sometimes early in the first millennium AD however,
they began to cultivate corn and other crops. Gradually, as they became more skilled at
gardening, they settled into permanent villages and developed a rich culture, characterized
by the great earthen mounds they erected as monuments to their gods and tombs for their
distinguished dead. Most of these early mound builders were part of the Adena-Hopewell
culture, which had its beginnings near the Ohio River and takes its name from sites in Ohio.
The culture spread southward into the present-day states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia,
and Florida. Its peoples became great traders
bartering jewelry, pottery, animal pelts, tools
and and other good along extensive trading networks that stretched up and down eastern North America and as far west as the Rocky Mountains.
About AD. 400, the Hopewell culture fell into decay, over the next centuries, it was
supplanted by another culture, the Mississippian, named after the river along which many
of its earliest villages were located. This complex civilization dominated the southeast from
about AD. 700 until shortly before the Europeans began arriving in the sixteenth century. At
the peak of its strength, about the year 1200, it was the most
advanced culture in North American. Like their Hopewell predecessors, the Mississippians
became highly skilled at growing food, although on a grander scale. They developed an
improved strain
of corn, which could survive in wet soil and a relatively cool climate, and
also learned to cultivate beans
indeed, agriculture became so important to the
Mississippians that it became closely associated with the sun
the guarantor of good crops.
Many tribes called themselves "children of the Sun" and believed their omnipotent
priest-chiefs were descendants of the great sun god.
Although most Mississippians lived in small villages, many others inhabited large
towns. Most of these towns boasted at least one major flat-topped mound on which stood
a temple that contained a sacred flame. Only priests and those charged with guarding the
frame could enter the temples. The mounds also served as ceremonial and trading sites,
and at times they were used as burial grounds.