A Yellow Road
The beginning of the Mississippian Era marks a seismic shift in the use and importance of maize, and later, bean agriculture - a shift tied to events and people outside the Southeast and Midwest. Maize agriculture increased dramatically, especially in areas of the Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highlands, Middle Mississippi, American Bottom, Black Warrior River Valley, and Ocmulgee River (Sievert 2011, Simon 2014, Fairbanks 1956). While these communities were different from each other in many ways and grew other crops prior to this era, there was a new and sudden acceptance of maize, along with the adoption of new traditions in myth, religion, and culture.
There is no single story or history of the Mississippian Era. It is a mosaic of peoples, cultures, experiences, and temporal changes. Some questions put forward in this project may be framed with regard to larger commonalities, but the diversity in action and expression, including significant variances in how people and polities interacted will be acknowledged and examined.
While dismissed by many scholars, there does seem to be a correspondence with the beginning of the Mississippian Era and the large-scale production of maize as a staple and sacred crop. In the last five years, there has been a major shift in our understanding of the role of maize in Mississippian America and the timing of its incorporation into native agriculture. However, maize was not just another plant incorporated into pre-existing myths and life ways. Its sacredness and sacred origins are clear and unique. In her 2014 paper, Mary Simon, one of the foremost experts in the study of maize use in the Midwest, reached the conclusion that late Woodland people would not have viewed maize as “corn-mother” unless that concept arrived with the plant (Simon 2014).
Maize agriculture was practiced east of the Mississippi well before 900 CE. Yet, its use was limited to a few isolated areas. The sudden incorporation of maize after this date carried with it certain mythological and religious ideas that were very different from anything prior.
It is likely that the impetus for this dramatic change was part of a flow of agricultural technology, ideas, and culture directly from Mesoamerica. This is not to exclude the Southwest as one possible source of material and cultural influence, or late Woodland culture and the lasting influence of Hopewellian traditions and trade routes.
Image: Jaguar gorget found at Fairfield Mound 2 in Benton County, Missouri. (University of Missouri)
Prior to the Mississippian Era, is what most archaeologists and historians call the Woodland Period. It runs roughly from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. There is no doubt that the Mississippian world was built on the foundations of Woodland traditions; the cultural exchange networks, trade routes, material culture, technology, worldview, and art.
People during the Woodland Period were already acquiring and trading a variety of exotic goods from across the continent, including copper, obsidian, marine shell, freshwater pearls, mica, tobacco, finely crafted stone pipes, and other luxury or prestige items produced by various regional artisans (Hudson 1976). One can clearly see Hopewellian influences throughout the art and culture of the Mississippian Era.
Interestingly, tobacco, or nicotiana rustica, arrived during this period after it was domesticated in Peru around 2000 BCE. Tobacco does not grow in the wild on its own. It is a domesticated plant that requires cultivation by humans. In just a few hundred years, it made its way to North America and the American Midwest and Southeast where it became an important crop long before other food crops. Soon after, and very early in the Woodland period, the Adena established tobacco, along with stylized pipes, as a centerpiece of native culture (Penney 2004). This would continue through the later Woodland period of Hopewell, through the Mississippian Era, and up to the present.
Current evidence indicates that there is a new reverence given to maize after 900 CE. Within two hundred years, the bean arrives. With their arrival, the mythology built around these agricultural products solidifies a cultural transition into what we have come to recognize today as the “Three Sisters”.
These new ideas were part of written and artistic traditions that were put down on deer skin, papyrus, ceramics, and stone far to the south in Mesoamerica. These concepts were likely viewed and understood in some form and communicated to the north with the agricultural knowledge needed for the propagation of maize. Based on some of the themes and imagery expressed in Mississippian art, artisans from the north either visited Mesoamerica or viewed material produced there. This was more than oral traditions diffused along marginal trade routes. They knew the paraphernalia and the sacred knowledge that was being communicated with these new ideas.
It was during this same time period that a conglomeration of ideas about Venus, the Feathered Serpent, and the Mexican wind god Ehecatl were being explored in Mesoamerica. These similarities are more than coincidence, they represent a cultural connection. In the south, the Feathered Serpent has always been central to humanity's relationship with maize. In Mississippian America, that relationship would continue.
The imagery of this religious movement dates to the Epi-classic horizon (700 CE - 1000 CE) and extended from Morelos and Puebla to the Gulf Coast and Yucatan. There appear to be centers dedicated to the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan) spread across the landscape, including sites such as Chichen Itza, Cholula, Cacaxtla, El Tajin, Xochicalco, and Tula. This religious movement was characterized by a specific complex of traits. It spread quickly and pilgrimage to these centers, by elites and commoners alike, was practiced by many. This continued into the Postclassic period (900 CE - 1540 CE) and is more than likely responsible for the spread of the Mixteca-Puebla style of art (Ringle, W. M., Negrón, T. G., & Bey, G. J. 1998).
As new varieties of maize were introduced from the south and west, new technological skills and knowledge needed to propagate them were also shared. Someone knew the art, culture, and technology personally and understood its larger implications. These are not abstract ideas passed along sporadically. These are traditions, images, and stories that endure. They have endured over centuries and thousands of miles because they draw upon the core themes of creation, death, rebirth, and renewal as it relates to maize. The motifs at play during this era are less about war and the military power of a ruler or great warrior; it is more likely related to fertility and the relationship between hunting, agriculture, rain, wind, water and the cycles of the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Four feathered serpents rotate around a center point. (Codex Borgia)
These interactions could not have occurred in one direction. Ideas were sure to have traveled in both directions. Around 700 CE, small triangular points make a sudden and dramatic appearance throughout most of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Plains to the Atlantic seaboard and south to the Gulf of Mexico. In Illinois, the bow and arrow appear between 600-700 CE and by 800 CE, in the Arkansas portion of the Central Mississippi Valley, with similar triangular points becoming more predominant in local sequences on the Cumberland Plateau, Carolina Piedmont, Gulf Coast Plain, and Florida (Blitz 1988).
Image: Geronimo with Apache bow. (Wikimedia Commons)
The introduction of this new technology was the result of the movement of Athabaskan people out of Alaska and Canada and into the south sometime after 500 CE. This included the Navajo or Diné, Plains Apache, Chiricagua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, and Lipan (Driver 1969). These groups would not arrive in most of their historic territories in the Southwest until the 1400s, where the Hopi and ancestral Pueblo had already been living for centuries. This new technology is thought to have been shared from Asia, across the Aleutians, and into Alaska and Canada in relatively recent times and is often referred to as the "Asian War Complex". This new technology included the more powerful recurve bow (Maschner & Mason 2013).
Bow and arrow technology continues to spread from the north and the west down into Mesoamerica as we reach the beginnings of the Post-Classic and the Mississippian Era. It has an immediate impact across North America and becomes an important symbol and new technology, both north and south of the Rio. This would also include the Chichimeca people of northern Mexico, who would later make their own advance south to become a dominant force in Post-Classic Mesoamerica as the Aztec.
While it is acknowledged that the Mississippians were part of a very large trade network, there seems to be a hesitation to take the complexity of that network seriously. Most surprisingly, is the hesitation and outright fear of investigating potential links with Mesoamerica. Somehow this vast Mississippian network wilts and dies in the dry deserts and humid coastlines of southern Texas and northern Mexico. It would take less than three weeks, walking during the day and stopping at night, to travel from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, into Caddo territory, to Nacogdoches, Texas, well into the western region of Mississippian influence.
There are far too many similarities and commonalities to rack up as pure coincidence. This cultural movement arrived directly from the south. It was not filtered through the cultures of the Southwest, where it then moved east across the plains. This was a separate and unique influx of ideas, culture, and technology. Somewhere in Northern Mexico and up through Texas may have been the route by which some of these ideas traveled, most likely with new varieties of corn and later beans. This suggests that they could have spread north and east from the Arkansas and Red River areas. We also cannot discount the possibility of another water route along the Gulf Coast.
Image: Caddo territory in East Texas, southwest Arkansas, and northwestern Louisiana as reported in 1687. (National Park Service)
Either way, Spiro and areas along the Arkansas and Red Rivers appear to be a more likely origin or introduction point for what we now recognize as Mississippian, much more so than Cahokia (Hall 2004). At present, there is a Cahokia first mentality, but that position is becoming more tenuous.
The activity at Spiro suggests that the burials there were unique. These individuals took on an importance unmatched in the Mississippian world. As early as 900 CE, recognizable Mississippian elements appear along side elements that would become Caddoan. At the Craig Mound, where the most items were found, the lowest levels of burials begin around this time (Sievert 2011).
These burials were elaborate, with an amazing variety of items brought from the east after a massive expansion in trade good inventory after 1000 CE, just as the central plaza and the mounds around it appear to take on a more sacrosanct role (Sievert 2011). Activity is limited there, as if its significance as a sacred space took on some greater importance. The individuals buried there may have some connection to the origin of Mississippian life ways.
Exotic goods and prestige items from every major region in the Mississippian world were being sent there throughout the Mississippian Era. These elites were unique and appear to have retained some status in regions far and wide. If Cahokia was first, then why are all these items being collected at Spiro instead? Spiro may be a smaller site, but its role may be more significant than originally thought.
Lower Mississippi
It seems likely that this new movement of ideas passed through the Caddo region, into Arkansas, and then to the Central Mississippi Valley, where these ideas would solidify with the participation of Muskogean people of the lower Mississippi and Souioan people from the Ohio River Valley. Some Muskogean people say that they originated west of the Mississippi and that they obtained many of their ceremonies while living there from what some called the "cult-bringer". They would go on to spread Mississippian culture to the east, where they would finally stop at Ocmulgee, Georgia, one of the earliest of Mississippian sites (Hudson 1976).
The center of this movement would shift north with the establishment of Cahokia. This mixing of various cultural groups in the formation of a great city based on a common vision would not be a first on the continent, as it was done hundreds of years earlier in the greatest of all ancient North American cities, Teotihuacan.
It should be noted that the Caddo people also grew amaranth, and specifically Amaranthus Hypochondriacus, which is endemic to Mexico. It originated there as a cultivar through selection and hybridization. It cannot survive long in the wild, just as we have found with tobacco (Perttula 2008).
Preconceived notions, founded on a colonial mentality about the abilities of native people, have obscured the truth. We know the Feathered Serpent was a centerpiece of Mississippian culture and that significant elements of the maize creation story were transmitted north. Also, further investigation of vegetal remains at Mississippian sites, including genetic studies, could provide important data in locating a source for some of the maize and bean varieties of the Mississippian Era, along with the new cultural and religious ideas that came with them.
Human head effigy vessel. (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian)
References:
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