Mississippian chiefdoms are what archaeologists have named politically allied community groups located in the southeastern and midwestern United States between the 12th and 16th centuries AD.
The chiefdoms are believed to have had their beginnings in the 11th century AD, in the Mississippi River basin community of Cahokia, located east across the Mississippi River from the modern city of St. Louis, Missouri. Similar artifacts, political structures, housing, public architecture, subsistence practices, iconography and ceremonial activities provide the evidence used by archaeologists to connect Mississippian communities throughout North America.
What's a Chiefdom?
The word chiefdom comes from a no-longer-used social evolutionary hierarchy of societies created in the 1960s by Sahlins and Service, among other economic anthropologists. The Sahlins and Service hierarchy classed human societies as bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states, depending on the elaboration of their social and political structures. Fifty years of archaeological and anthropological research have led scholars to believe that the artificial categories don't really describe any culture, past or present, and in fact have the net effect of stifling research.
Instead, modern scholars of prehistoric societies use archaeological evidence, anthropological correlates and historical contact sources (such as the De Soto chronicles) to identify power relationships and rules.
Characteristics
Archaeologists have identified the capitals of the Mississippian chiefdom as grand plazas surrounded by mounds of varying shapes and sizes. Some of the mounds served as elevating platforms where elite personages resided. Other mounds served as cemeteries, or bases for charnel houses, residences or other functions. Residences were often clustered around the plaza; the main parts of the town were often surrounded by defensive walls made of vertical wooden poles called palisades.
Scholars are quite divided about many aspects of Mississippian chiefdoms: population estimates, geographic range of control, and what that "control" meant in a real sense of the word. What they do agree on is that a limited number of paramount chiefdoms existed at any one time: the major political centers include Cahokia, Moundville, Etowah, Spiro, Kincaid and several others.
This list of Mississippian chiefdoms includes a few of the societies located along the routes taken by early European explorers and thus reported by them, as well as some others identified archaeologically. They were multicommunity chiefdoms, governed by a paramount chief, with ties to vassal towns and neighboring polities based on trade, diplomacy and warfare.
Sources
Beck RA, Jr. 2003. Consolidation and Hierarchy: Chiefdom Variability in the Mississippian Southeast. American Antiquity 68(4):641-661.
Cobb CR. 2003. Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex? Annual Review of Anthropology 32(1):63-84.
Jackson HE, and Scott SL. 2003. Patterns of Elite Faunal Utilization at Moundville, Alabama. American Antiquity 68(3).
Pauketat TR. 2007. Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. Lanham, Maryland: Altamira Press.
Smith AT. 2011. Archaeologies of Sovereignty. Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1):415-432.
Coosa
CB Moore, 1907
The polity reported by the De Soto chroniclers as Coosa, lay within Tennessee Valley in the modern states of eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. Coosa included perhaps as many as 50,00 people living in some 50-80 villages along a 300 mile stretch of the Coosa River. Their paramount chief's village was likely the archaeological site of Little Egypt.
Other archaeological sites believed to have been part of the Coosa polity include the King Site and Etowah.
Apafalaya
Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress
Apafalaya was another Mississippian chiefdom visited by Hernando de Soto's brutal expedition. Scholars believe that the polity's capital was located at the site called Moundville, located in the Black Warrior River basin of Alabama. Towns, hamlets and farmsteads associated with the Moundville polity include a 25 mile stretch of the Black Warrior river.
Itaba
By the time De Soto's expedition passed through that is today Georgia in 1540, the full-blown glory of Itawa was passed, and it had become a mere shadow of its former self. Scholars believe that the archaeological site of Etowah is what remains of its capital city. At its heyday, Etowah had a local population of about 1,400 people, with six major platforms in a palisaded area of some 54 acres.
Cahokia
© Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site
The largest paramount community recognized as a Mississippian chiefdom is Cahokia, on the Mississippi River in Illinois. People who lived within the urban limits of this city probably numbered between 3,000 and 12,000: people within range of Cahokia's polity are unknown, as is what its residents called it.
