Report a correction
The Mississippian world
Mississippian is the archaeologists' name for the societies that built flat-topped earthen pyramids along the rivers of eastern North America between 1000 and 1450. The Mississippian world was not one state but a set of chiefdoms sharing religious motifs, town form and agriculture. De Soto's expedition of 1539–1542 encountered them functioning, and its accounts are the only eyewitness description of these societies at work — a century later most were gone, felled by the diseases the expedition itself carried. It is among the clearest cases of a culture documented exactly once, by those who destroyed it.
Factual errors are corrected without argument once documented. What you send is read by a person and checked against sources — nothing changes automatically. See the editorial policy.