Mississippian Culture
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Mississippian Culture trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Centuries before Columbus, farming peoples along the Mississippi and its tributaries raised earthen pyramids, laid out great plazas and built a city, Cahokia, whose size startles most people who hear of it for the first time. Archaeologists call them the Mississippians, and their story is one of the least known chapters of North American history. This quiz gathers the fun facts people go looking for: how the great mounds were raised, what the towns ate, the game that drew gamblers, the engraved shell and copper art, and what happened when Spanish soldiers marched through. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It is pitched for curious beginners, students of Native American history and anyone planning a visit to a mound site. The early questions cover the famous places; the later ones dig into the details.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The base of Monks Mound at Cahokia is roughly the same size as the base of which ancient monument?
Great Pyramid of Giza
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.
Q 02By the highest estimates, no US city outgrew Cahokia's peak population until which one did in the 1780s?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 03Which conquistador crossed Mississippian chiefdoms from 1539 and died beside the Mississippi River?
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto was the first European documented crossing the Mississippi, and his chroniclers left some of the earliest written accounts of Mississippian towns.
Q 04Mississippian farmers grew maize, beans and squash together, a trio widely known by what name?
The Three Sisters
The Three Sisters fed Cahokia's growth, though one sister arrived late: domesticated beans were not grown there until about 1250.
Q 05Settlers in 1830s Wisconsin named a Mississippian town site for the legendary homeland of which people?
The Aztecs
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.
Q 06Which Southern college city is named for a Mississippian chief who fought Spanish invaders at Mabila?
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa honours Chief Tuskaloosa, whom chroniclers described as about a foot and a half taller than the Spaniards he ambushed at Mabila in 1540.
Q 07Spanish explorers herded which animals through Mississippian country in 1539, leaving feral descendants?
Pigs
Pigs travelled as a walking food supply for the soldiers; escapees are counted among the ancestors of the Southeast's feral razorbacks.
Q 08Which globally grown crop was first domesticated in eastern North America, long before maize arrived?
Sunflower
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.
Q 09Cahokia's builders moved some 22 million cubic feet of soil for Monks Mound using which simple containers?
Woven baskets
Woven baskets carried every load of soil and clay, raising four terraces to about 100 feet without a single block of stone.
Q 10Cahokia, the largest Mississippian city, lies just across the river from St. Louis in which state?
Illinois
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.
Q 11Which Mississippian game, born near Cahokia, had players hurl spears at a rolling stone disc?
Chunkey
Chunkey drew heavy gambling, with some players wagering everything they owned; the prized stones belonged to towns or clans rather than individuals.
Q 12Which festival of fasting and dancing, still held by Southeastern nations, has Mississippian roots?
Green Corn Ceremony
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.
Q 13Cahokia Mounds gained which international status in 1982, one it shares with the Grand Canyon?
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Q 21Maize, the Mississippians' staple, was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which country?
Mexico
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.
Q 22The 1894 report that debunked a 'lost race' of Mound Builders came from a bureau of which institution?
The Smithsonian
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.
Q 23What two-mile barrier ringed Cahokia's high-status central district and was rebuilt several times?
A wooden palisade
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.
Q 14What kind of buildings usually stood on the flat summits of Mississippian platform mounds?
Temples and elite houses
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.
Q 15After a 1729 uprising killed hundreds of colonists, which European power scattered the Natchez by 1731?
France
France sent troops that broke the Natchez strongholds, and most captured survivors were shipped to Saint-Domingue and sold into slavery.
Q 16An elite burial in Cahokia's Mound 72 lay on a bed of shell beads long read as the shape of which bird?
Falcon
Falcon imagery runs through Mississippian art as the winged Birdman warrior; the same mound held more than 250 other skeletons, many of them sacrificed.
Q 17Monks Mound is named for which religious order, whose members grew crops on its terraces around 1810?
Trappists
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.
Q 18The Natchez, who kept Mississippian ways into the 1700s, gave their hereditary ruler which title?
Great Sun
Great Sun was a title inherited through women: each holder was the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would bear the next one.
Q 19Moundville, a huge Mississippian site, overlooks the Black Warrior River in which state?
Alabama
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.
Q 20Spiro Mounds, whose looted Craig Mound was dubbed an American King Tut's Tomb, lies in which state?
Oklahoma
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.
A wooden palisade with bastions and watchtowers first went up around 1175, cutting straight through older neighbourhoods as it sealed off the centre.
Q 24Cahokia's Woodhenge, a sunrise calendar of tall posts, was built from which sacred tree?
Red cedar
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.
Q 25Mississippian potters strengthened their clay with the crushed shells of which river animals?
Mussels
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.
Q 26A rare type of Mississippian jar, found mainly in Arkansas and Missouri, has its whole body modelled as what?
A human head
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.
Q 27Mississippians around present-day Nashville buried their dead in box-shaped coffins made of what?
Stone slabs
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.
Q 28Angel Mounds, a walled Mississippian town near Evansville, Indiana, stands beside which river?
The Ohio
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.
Q 29Which archaeological period, famed for Hopewell burial mounds, came just before the Mississippian?
Woodland
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.
Q 30In Mississippian belief the dead travelled the Path of Souls, seen as which feature of the night sky?
The Milky Way
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.