ABSTRACT
Introduction The long, slow evolution of Archaic cultures in the Eastern Woodlands brought with it an ever more intimate knowledge of food plants, which in turn led to the domestication of some of them. During the heyday of Adena and Hopewell cultures and their widespread networks of trade and exchange people came to depend upon tubers and the starchy and oily seeds of various native plants, to the extent that some of them had become domesticates through artificial selection (see Chapter 5). But chiefdoms did not arise in the Eastern
Woodlands until Mesoamerican maize was added to the regional diet. Large platform mound chiefdom centers appeared first along the rich bottomlands of the middle course of the Mississippi River. Over the course of three centuries they cropped up elsewhere in the Southeast, from the edge of the Great Plains to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts (Figure 9.1). Curiously, not all of them depended upon agriculture. The challenge to archaeologists has been to describe and explain the rise and spread of Mississippian societies, which were still thriving at the time of Hernando de Soto’s 1539-1543 entrada (overland expedition).
