cult to imagine relatively primitive Woodland peoples inflicting such mis-
chief, terror, wounding, and death upon the Spaniards as they suffered at
Apalachee, Mabila, Chicaza, and Tula and on the Mississippi River. How-
ever disadvantaged militarily compared with Europeans, who had horses,
armor, firearms, pathogens, and ultimate numbers, Mississippians were
complex warring societies themselves that had for many centuries trans-
formed landscapes to create and maintain security and comfort.
Archaic Americans, like archaic Europeans, Asians, and Africans, lived
literally in darkness—that is, beneath the canopies of forests. Fire from the
heavens opened the world to light and the opportunity not only to hunt
small and large animals browsing in the so-called edge regrowth environ-
ments that fire created, but to begin the selection and encouragement
of certain useful plants. The apparently universal lesson of the utility of
lightning-fire seems inevitable: people could make, keep, and use fire delib-
erately to manage landscapes.^7 So in forested eastern North America (as in
forested elsewheres), what is called the Woodland cultural tradition began
ca. ...or so. Firing the woods, hunting and fishing, and gathering
and encouraging plants all supported cooperative effort and gendered sub-
sistence roles. Men went forth with firesticks and the tools of hunting and
fishing; women gathered, harvested, and made homes among villages con-
sisting, we think, of clans of related people. Religion and ritual evolved to
sustain the people and their system of subsistence.^8
Then, not suddenly but approximately .., some (not all) Wood-
land peoples began to disturb the earth with hoes and sticks and to plant
corn. Squashes of many sorts seem already to have passed a primitive en-
couragement phase into cultivation. About two centuries after corn came
beans, and the great Mesoamerican triad was in place in North America’s
Southeast. Now Mississippian civilization evolved relatively rapidly. Inten-
sive agriculture—still supplemented by fishing, hunting, and gathering—
was the foundation of most of the cultures that Europeans encountered in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However gradually it evolved and
however similar it was to late Woodland culture, cultivation must be called
revolutionary in its effects. Now populations certainly leaped, and villages
became what we must call towns. Surpluses of food and finished goods ex-
tended exchanges between different peoples often hundreds, even more
than a thousand, miles away. (Cahokia’s mounds contained copper and
mica sheets and ornaments from the Appalachian mountains and carved
shells from the Atlantic coast.) Larger populations placed demands on re-