User:Rchanpstcc/sandbox

Mound Builders

Fact: Their food consisted mostly of fish and deer, as well as available plants.

Chanca, Ingrid, et al. “Food and Diet of the Pre-Columbian Mound Builders of the Patos Lagoon Region in Southern Brazil with Stable Isotope Analysis.” Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 133, Elsevier Ltd, 2021, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2021.105439.

Quote: "Four food sources with their respective macronutrient compositions were considered: terrestrial/freshwater animals (protein, lipids), marine/estuarine animals (protein, lipids), C3 plants (protein, carbohydrates), and C4 plants (protein, carbohydrates)."

"A great diversity of marine catfish and drums is also observed in the Patos Lagoon and adjacent marine areas today (Garcia et al., 2003). Aquatic birds, freshwater turtles and terrestrial mammals, mainly small rodents, carnivores and deer, were also exploited in the area."

DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2021.105439

Phase Three

Vernon James Knight, Jr. Mound Excavations at Moundville. The University of Alabama Press, 2010. This book delves further into how the mounds were made for religious or political reasons. This book also goes into detail about how the pottery found was able to divide the mound into political phases in which it changes.

Silverberg, Robert. Mound Builders. Ohio University Press, 1986. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/23680. I chose this because it speaks on how the introduction of the “white man” likely influenced their religion and ultimately led to the demise of the mound builders. The disappearance of the mound builders is still unknown and debated, but many agree that the foreigners introduced new diseases and caused many mound building civilizations to disappear without a trace.

Phase Four

although monumental  architecture  is  not  exclusive  to complex  societies  (gibson  and  Carr  2004),  it  is  certainly ubiquitous in  chiefdoms  and  early  states,  and  it  correlates well with increasing social stratification (trigger 1990:120). in the case of Moundville, there are preliminary clues that the building of its mound- and- plaza arrangement had to do with the inauguration of a new, potentially stratified social order. by stratified, i mean a cultural ordering of social seg- ments such that their members were notably unequal in re- spect to their ability to control or exploit production and la- bor, especially  that  of  non- kin  (see  adams  1975;  hendon 1991). Models of Moundville’s economy to date have em- phasized elite control over productive resources (steponaitis 1978, 1991; Welch 1991, 1996; Welch and scarry 1995), al- though recent research has begun to question the extent of that control (Marcoux 2007; Muller 1997; Wilson 2001).

Summary: In Moundville, building new mounds symbolized a new social order, and the elite have control over resources, and exploited people that were not family members.

In that  case,  the  cult  could  not  have  been  a  movement expressing despair over the Spanish invasions. A. J. Waring, Jr., has  suggested  that  the  Temple  Mound  religion  was  an expression  of  vitality  rather  than  of  terror, and  that  the symbols we  find  so  frightening  were  only  emblems  of  har- vest and  renewal. But carbon-14  dates  are  still  subject  to revision,  and  it  may  yet  be  found  that  the  cult  was  a  six- teenth-century development,  a  reaction  to  the  menace  of the white-skinned strangers

Summary: The introduction of "white-skinned strangers" caused the development of a new religion within the mound builders.

The end  came. We do  not  know  how  and  why. It is simplest to say that the Temple Mound cultures were shattered by  the  arrival  of  the  white  man. with his  con- tagious new  diseases  and  his  habit of enslaving  the  peoples he met .. No doubt de Soto and his successors had much to do with the disruption of a way of life that had grown complex and magnificent  over  some  eight  centuries. Certainly there were still many thriving centers of Temple Mound life when de Soto  came  in  1540;  just  as  certainly,  these  centers  were virtually abandoned  by the  late  seventeenth  century. We can easily  imagine  a  combination  of  disease  and  despair snuffing out  the  villagers  of  the  Southeast.

Summary: De Soto had forever changed the lives of the mound builders, and coming into contact with explorers brought diseases that wiped them out.

Around 900–1450 CE, the Mississippian culture developed and spread through the Eastern United States, primarily along the river valleys.[16] The largest regional center where the Mississippian culture is first definitely developed is located in Illinois near the Mississippi, and is referred to presently as Cahokia. It had several regional variants including the Middle Mississippian culture of Cahokia, the South Appalachian Mississippian variant at Moundville and Etowah, the Plaquemine Mississippian variant in south Louisiana and Mississippi,[17] and the Caddoan Mississippian culture of northwestern Louisiana, eastern Texas, and southwestern Arkansas.[18] Like the mound builders of the Ohio, these people built gigantic mounds as burial and ceremonial places.[19] In Moundville, building new mounds symbolized a new social order, and the elite have control over resources, and exploited people that were not family members.

Later explorers to the same regions, only a few decades after mound-building settlements had been reported, found the regions largely depopulated with its residents vanished and the mounds untended. Conflicts with Europeans were dismissed by historians as the major cause of populations reduction, since only few clashes had occurred between the natives and the Europeans in the area during the same period. The most-widely accepted explanation behind the disappearances were the infectious diseases from the Old World, such as smallpox and influenza, which had decimated most of the Native Americans from the last mound-builder civilization.[26][27][28][29] De Soto had forever changed the lives of the mound builders, and coming into contact with explorers brought diseases that wiped them out.