Mound building cultures developed in the Southeast and the lower Midwest of what is today the United States from 2200 B. c. to A. D. 1600, and they represent the most sophisticated indigenous cultural development east of the Great Plains.
Poverty Point, the first mound building culture, developed in the lower Mississippi Valley and part of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Residents there participated in an extensive trade network, developed pottery, and cultivated gourds. The Poverty Point culture is most famous for one set of mounds built at Macon Ridge in present-day Louisiana, also known as Poverty Point. This site consists of six midden ridges that formed six semicircles and two large mounds. The mounds seem to have had some ceremonial significance, and the society apparently developed into an early form of a chiefdom. The Poverty Point culture lasted from 2200 to 1000 B. c.
The Adena were the next mound building people to arise. Their culture developed in the central Ohio River Valley around 500 B. c., where these people created a ceremonial system that centered on a burial complex. At first, the mortuary systems consisted of simple mounds built over grave pits. By 200 B. c. they began to place the dead in charnel houses until the house filled. Then the charnel housed were burned and mounds were built over them. Finally, another charnel house was constructed on top of the mound, and the process began again. The Adena also built effigy mounds that related to the ceremonial complex. They practiced a hunting and gathering subsistence, but they were primarily sedentary. The Adena ceremonial complex lasted until approximately A. D. 1, when it was absorbed by the Hopewell culture.
The Hopewell ceremonial complex originated in two locations, south-central Illinois and central Indiana and Ohio. Eventually these two cultural groups merged with the Adena complex to form the Hopewell ceremonial complex. The Hopewell people used conical platform mounds
Aerial view of the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio
As staging areas for religious ceremonies. Burials began to contain a wide range of artifacts. The more important individuals had the largest and most elaborate burials with the most grave goods. The Hopewell used charnel houses like the Adena but on a larger scale, and their funeral mounds were also bigger. Many of the ceremonial items used in burials came from raw materials acquired in an extensive trade system that contained materials gathered from the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. They also developed a limited form of horticulture but were not completely dependent upon it. The Hopewell complex faded between A. D. 700 and 900 primarily because its trade network collapsed and possibly because warfare in the Midwest increased due to the introduction of the bow and arrow to the region. Mound building continued in the Mississippi Valley and along the Gulf Coast, and this led to the development of the Mississippian culture.
Further reading: Judith A. Bense, Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: Paleoindian to World War I (New York: Academic Press, 1994); Jon L. Gibson, “Poverty Point: The First American Chiefdom,” Archaeology 27 (1974): 95-105; R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout, eds., Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Bruce Smith, ed., Mississippian Emergence (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
—Dixie Ray Haggard
World History
