sources. Forests were scavenged for firewood and building materials as well
as fired for crop fields and hunting parks. Growth doubtlessly necessitated
management and leadership, so social hierarchy arose, along with more
complex rituals connected with nobilities’ legitimacy and ethnic loyalty and
cooperation.
Ceremonial flat-topped earthen mounds, little known among Woodland
phase peoples, characterized the Mississippians. The largest of these—for
example, at Etowah in Georgia or Moundsville in Alabama—consisted of
thousands of square yards of earth dug or scraped with tools pathetically ill
suited by modern standards and carried sometimes considerable distances
in baskets by hand. Meanwhile, rivalries for leadership as well as contests
between peoples for resources encouraged war, which also marked land-
scapes. A Mississippian town typically had at least one mound but also a
palisade around the mound, plaza, and houses. Palisades were typically
composed of upright tree trunks stripped and anchored tightly together,
sometimes also bound and buttressed with heavy plant fibers and daubed
with clay—another demand on forests that exposed the earth to the sun. No
wonder that the Spanish understood Quigualtam’s title—and the French
acknowledged that of subsequent Natchez superchiefs—as the Great Sun.
The astral sun itself, of course, figured large in natives’ sense of power on
earth. Still, it was a part of the ‘‘southeastern ceremonial complex,’’ a system
of signifiers evident from Texas to the Atlantic, from the Ohio Valley to the
Gulf. Artists represented the complex in carvings, ornaments, and chiefs’
dress with stylized mythic animals such as winged serpents and birdlike
humanoids. Another important symbol, much noticed by European Chris-
tians, was a cross within a circle. This probably represented the cardinal
directions, also large in native cosmology. Forces of nature, represented by
mythic animals and by north, south, east, and west, must be recognized
and reconciled by appropriate human behavior.
The annual Green Corn Ceremony, however, widely reported by Euro-
peans before the eighteenth century, reveals late-Mississippian culture at
its foundation. By mid- or late summer, as first corn crops approached
maturity, all the clans in a polity would begin to prepare for the ceremony by
purging themselves, fasting, and bathing. Then came dances and the recita-
tion of town histories. Each town’s communal fire would be relighted. Then
women, who were the farmers, presented the new corn. Young people re-
ceived their adult names. All crimes except murder were publicly forgiven,
unhappy marriages were dissolved, and new spouses were taken. At last