40 Fun Facts About Mississippian Culture

The base of Monks Mound at Cahokia is roughly the same size as the base of which ancient monument?

The Great Pyramid of Giza and Monks Mound cover similar ground, but the mound is layered soil and clay rather than stone, begun around 900–950 CE.

By the highest estimates, no US city outgrew Cahokia's peak population until which one did in the 1780s?

Philadelphia passed 40,000 people in the 1780s, the first US city to top the highest estimates for Cahokia. The mound city had been empty for centuries by then.

Which conquistador crossed Mississippian chiefdoms from 1539 and died beside the Mississippi River?

Hernando de Soto was the first European documented crossing the Mississippi, and his chroniclers left some of the earliest written accounts of Mississippian towns.

Mississippian farmers grew maize, beans and squash together, a trio widely known by what name?

The Three Sisters fed Cahokia's growth, though one sister arrived late: domesticated beans were not grown there until about 1250.

Settlers in 1830s Wisconsin named a Mississippian town site for the legendary homeland of which people?

The Aztecs told of a northern homeland, so N. F. Hyer, who made the first rough survey of the ruins, named them Aztalan; the walled town was really built by Mississippian people.

Which Southern college city is named for a Mississippian chief who fought Spanish invaders at Mabila?

Tuscaloosa honours Chief Tuskaloosa, whom chroniclers described as about a foot and a half taller than the Spaniards he ambushed at Mabila in 1540.

Spanish explorers herded which animals through Mississippian country in 1539, leaving feral descendants?

Pigs travelled as a walking food supply for the soldiers; escapees are counted among the ancestors of the Southeast's feral razorbacks.

Which globally grown crop was first domesticated in eastern North America, long before maize arrived?

Sunflower was among the oily-seeded plants tamed by Native farmers by about 1800 BCE, and it stayed in the fields after maize took over.

Cahokia's builders moved some 22 million cubic feet of soil for Monks Mound using which simple containers?

Woven baskets carried every load of soil and clay, raising four terraces to about 100 feet without a single block of stone.

Cahokia, the largest Mississippian city, lies just across the river from St. Louis in which state?

Illinois holds the site, near Collinsville; the name Cahokia comes from a later tribe living there when Europeans arrived in the 1600s, not from the builders.

Which Mississippian game, born near Cahokia, had players hurl spears at a rolling stone disc?

Chunkey drew heavy gambling, with some players wagering everything they owned; the prized stones belonged to towns or clans rather than individuals.

Which festival of fasting and dancing, still held by Southeastern nations, has Mississippian roots?

The Green Corn Ceremony opens the yearly harvest: historically the community gave up the first green ears so that the rest of the crop would thrive.

Cahokia Mounds gained which international status in 1982, one it shares with the Grand Canyon?

UNESCO World Heritage Site status came in 1982; the state had first protected the mounds in 1923, when its legislature authorised buying land for a park.

What kind of buildings usually stood on the flat summits of Mississippian platform mounds?

Temples and elite houses crowned the mounds; about every twenty years the building came down, fresh fill went on and a new one rose on the higher summit.

After a 1729 uprising killed hundreds of colonists, which European power scattered the Natchez by 1731?

France sent troops that broke the Natchez strongholds, and most captured survivors were shipped to Saint-Domingue and sold into slavery.

An elite burial in Cahokia's Mound 72 lay on a bed of shell beads long read as the shape of which bird?

Falcon imagery runs through Mississippian art as the winged Birdman warrior; the same mound held more than 250 other skeletons, many of them sacrificed.

Monks Mound is named for which religious order, whose members grew crops on its terraces around 1810?

Trappists settled on a smaller mound nearby in 1809 and planted wheat on the big mound's upper levels, safely above the floods; they left in 1813.

The Natchez, who kept Mississippian ways into the 1700s, gave their hereditary ruler which title?

Great Sun was a title inherited through women: each holder was the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would bear the next one.

Moundville, a huge Mississippian site, overlooks the Black Warrior River in which state?

Alabama is home to Moundville, where 29 platform mounds ring a rectangular plaza; the state university's museums now run it as an archaeological park.

Spiro Mounds, whose looted Craig Mound was dubbed an American King Tut's Tomb, lies in which state?

Oklahoma is where commercial diggers tunnelled into Craig Mound in the 1930s, sold its treasures and dynamited the burial chamber; the looting pushed the state to pass a law protecting the site.

Maize, the Mississippians' staple, was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which country?

Mexico is where farmers bred maize from a wild grass called teosinte; the crop then took thousands of years to become the Mississippians' main food.

The 1894 report that debunked a 'lost race' of Mound Builders came from a bureau of which institution?

The Smithsonian housed the ethnology bureau that published it; author Cyrus Thomas began the survey believing in a vanished race and ended by dismissing every argument for one.

What two-mile barrier ringed Cahokia's high-status central district and was rebuilt several times?

A wooden palisade with bastions and watchtowers first went up around 1175, cutting straight through older neighbourhoods as it sealed off the centre.

Cahokia's Woodhenge, a sunrise calendar of tall posts, was built from which sacred tree?

Red cedar is the area's only native evergreen and resists decay; the 1985 reconstruction found enough logs for only half the posts and used black locust for the rest.

Mississippian potters strengthened their clay with the crushed shells of which river animals?

Mussels supplied the temper that kept pots from shrinking and cracking as they dried and fired; white shell flecks now help archaeologists spot Mississippian pottery.

A rare type of Mississippian jar, found mainly in Arkansas and Missouri, has its whole body modelled as what?

A human head forms the entire vessel of a head pot; the faces are typically male and commonly appear to be those of the dead.

Mississippians around present-day Nashville buried their dead in box-shaped coffins made of what?

Stone slabs of limestone or shale, rocks that break naturally into flat sheets, were arranged in a rectangle for the walls and laid across the top as a lid.

Angel Mounds, a walled Mississippian town near Evansville, Indiana, stands beside which river?

The Ohio ran past a walled town of up to 1,000 people; the site takes its name from the Angel family, who began buying the farmland in 1852.

Which archaeological period, famed for Hopewell burial mounds, came just before the Mississippian?

Woodland peoples built mostly burial mounds and grew native seed crops; the Mississippians who followed made maize their staple and gathered in far larger towns.

In Mississippian belief the dead travelled the Path of Souls, seen as which feature of the night sky?

The Milky Way was the road of the dead; some researchers argue that mound axes at Moundville, Angel and Cahokia line up with it on the night of the summer solstice.

Much of the copper hammered into Mississippian ritual plates came from the shores of which Great Lake?

Lake Superior copper was shaped without casting: smiths hammered and annealed the raw metal into thin sheets over a fire, then embossed designs into them.

Mississippian gorgets, pendants worn at the neck, were mostly carved from the shell of which sea snail?

Lightning whelk shells were harvested off Florida and the Gulf coast and traded far inland; the same species supplied cups for the ritual black drink.

The caffeinated 'black drink', traced in Cahokia's cups, was brewed mainly from which plant?

Yaupon holly is native to the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain, so residue in Cahokia's beakers shows its leaves were traded hundreds of miles inland.

Mill Creek chert, quarried and traded widely by Mississippians, was prized for making which tools?

Hoes of Mill Creek chert are numerous at Cahokia and reached sites as distant as Spiro and Moundville; workers roughed them out in small hamlets near the quarries.

Which nation's oral tradition calls Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon 'the place where we first sat down'?

Muscogee tradition says their ancestors ended a long migration from the west at the mounds, where one earth lodge has been dated to about a thousand years ago.

Mississippian mound builders of the Red River valley were direct ancestors of which present-day nation?

Caddo ancestors raised huge earthworks from about 800 CE, and archaeologists trace an unbroken line from those towns to the modern tribe.

Which Native nation bought Sugarloaf Mound, the last Mississippian mound standing in St. Louis?

The Osage Nation bought the house and land on the mound in 2009 to preserve it; the city once had about 40 mounds and the nickname Mound City.

Which Spanish captain built a fort in 1567 at the Mississippian town of Joara in North Carolina?

Juan Pardo left a garrison at Joara that lasted about 18 months before Native people destroyed it and his five other forts; only one soldier of 120 survived.

Chucalissa, a Mississippian mound village with a museum, sits on a river bluff inside which Tennessee city?

Memphis owes the site to Civilian Conservation Corps workers who turned up artifacts there in the 1930s; the name Chucalissa means 'abandoned house'.

Archaeologists found Cahokia's Woodhenge in the early 1960s while working ahead of construction of what?

A highway interchange was planned there, and Warren Wittry's salvage dig hit arcs of post pits that he guessed were whole circles tracking solstices and equinoxes.