What did the Mound Builders trade?
The Adena traded copper and mica objects with other tribes. They are best known for making stone tobacco pipes that were up to ten inches long. The Adena also made pottery; decorative objects from copper, bone, antler, and clamshell; and tools and weapons from stone and flint. Their mounds came in two forms.
What did the Mound Builders do?
The various cultures collectively termed “Mound Builders” were prehistoric, indigenous inhabitants of North America who, during a 5,000-year period, constructed various styles of earthen mounds for religious, ceremonial, burial, and elite residential purposes.
What were Mississippian mounds used for?
Most Mississippian mounds are rectangular, flat-topped earthen platforms upon which temples or residences of chiefs were erected.
What were some of the crops that the Mississippian Mound Builders produced?
Mississippians depended on corn for food, and they cleared and planted fields near their towns and villages. Non-native crops-corn (Zea mays), squash (Cucurbita), and eventually beans (Phaseolus vulgaris)-soon became mainstays of the Mississippian diet. Pottery jar, Dickson Mounds site, Fulton County.
How did the Mound Builders die?
Another possibility is that the Mound Builders died from a highly infectious disease. Numerous skeletons show that most Mound Builders died before the age of 50, with the most deaths occurring in their 30s.
What language did the Mound Builders speak?
So far as anyone knows, the Mound Builders had no written language; they speak now only through what may be studied from the artifacts they left behind.
What was the location of the largest mound building culture?
LaDonna Brown, Tribal Anthropologist for the Chickasaw Nation Department of History & Culture, describes Cahokia Mounds, which is located on the site of a pre-Columbian Native American city directly across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis.
What two cultures are known as Mound Builders?
There are three different cultures that prospered at three different times that are classified as Mound Builders: the Adena (1000 BCE–200 CE), the Hopewell (100 BCE–700 CE), and Mississippian (500 CE–1600 CE).
What Indian tribes were mound builders?
Scholars believe that as the Adena traded with other groups of American Indians, the practice of mound-building spread. Other Mound Builders were the Hopewell and the Mississippian people. The Hopewell were hunters and gatherers but they also cultivated corn and squash.
What are the three types of mounds?
North American archaeology Native Americans built a variety of mounds, including flat-topped pyramids or cones known as platform mounds, rounded cones, and ridge or loaf-shaped mounds. Some mounds took on unusual shapes, such as the outline of cosmologically significant animals. These are known as effigy mounds.
What is inside an Indian mound?
Mounds could be built out of topsoil, packed clay, detritus from the cleaning of plazas, sea shells, freshwater mussel shells or fieldstones. All of the largest mounds were built out of packed clay. All of the mounds were built with individual human labor.
In what parts of North America did the mound builders live?
Mound Builders, in North American archaeology, name given to those people who built mounds in a large area from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mts. The greatest concentrations of mounds are found in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.
What was the greatest mound building civilization?
Cahokia was the largest city ever built north of Mexico before Columbus and boasted 120 earthen mounds. Many were massive, square-bottomed, flat-topped pyramids — great pedestals atop which civic leaders lived. At the vast plaza in the city’s center rose the largest earthwork in the Americas, the 100-foot Monks Mound.
What caused the greatest number of Native American fatalities?
1: warfare with Europeans. 2: diseases spread by European contact. 3: warfare between Native American groups. 4: natural disasters.
How did the Paleo Indians travel to America?
So how did people first come to the Americas? Archaeologists think the first Americans probably crossed from Siberia into North America. Some people may have walked across the Bering Land Bridge. The Bering Land Bridge was a wide strip of land that connected Siberia and North America during the Ice Age.
Did Paleo-Indians have dogs?
Dogs were long thought to have accompanied the first migrations into the Americas, but conclusive evidence for Paleoindian dogs is lacking. The dog’s domestication and earliest uses have been topics of much debate in the archaeological and genomic literature, especially over the last decade (Germonpré et al.
Who was the leader of the Paleo-Indians?
Heinrich Harder (1858–1935), c. 1920. The Lithic peoples or Paleo-Indians are the earliest-known settlers of the Americas. The period’s name derives from the appearance of “lithic flaked” stone tools.
What religion were the Paleo-Indians?
It also seems likely that Paleoamericans practiced animistic religion, in which a spiritual essence is assigned to natural forces such as fire, water, thunder, mountains, and animals, sometimes giving them power over humans. Later Virginia Indians practiced something similar.
What happened in the Paleo era?
The Paleoindian Period refers to a time approximately 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age when humans first appeared in the archeological record in North America. One of the original groups to enter what is now Canada and the United States was the Clovis culture.