ABSTRACT
North American Indians developed many different ways of procuring and producing food by practicing strategies that cover the broad zone from foraging to agricultural economies. In this paper, the focus is on another region, the Tensas Basin of northeastern Louisiana in the lower Mississippi Valley, where non-domesticated plants and animals were for millennia the primary foods for densely packed, territorial people. The major food resources in the Mississippian embayment of northeastern Louisiana and western Mississippi are concentrated in arcuate oxbow lakes and bayous and on the levees that border them. The Coles Creek culture began to develop between AD 700 and 800 and lasted for more than 400 years, with numerous mound-and-plaza centers built in the Tensas Valley of Louisiana and southern Yazoo Valley of Mississippi. The lower Mississippi Valley is not the only place in North America where sedentary, ranked societies developed in the absence of classic agriculture as defined by the economic dependence on fully domesticated plants.
