Existing comment:
Woodland Indians led a more settled lifestyle:
Early Woodland 1000-150BC:
Early Woodland people established more permanent settlements from which they sent out parties to hunt and father. They learned how to cultivate food: squash, pumpkins, and other seed-bearing plants were the first crops grown in the American Bottom. They learned to make pottery, to cook, and to store their food. Although the pottery was thick and often crude, storing food was a big advance toward a settled life. Some Early Woodland short-term encampments were located near Cahokia.
In the upper Ohio River Valley, near present-day Chillicothe, Ohio, the Adena people constructed burial mounds as early as 500 BC. Mound building, foreshadowed in the Archaic Era, would command the attention of many peoples in the coming centuries.
Middle Woodland 150BC-AD 300:
Spiritual life became important to Woodland peoples. By the Middle Woodland Period, the mound-building Adenas had vanished, but over a broader area of the Ohio and Illinois River valleys the Hopewell culture flourished. The Hopewell built hundreds of burial mounds and tremendous geometric earthworks.
Hopewell people organized a remarkable trade network which reached from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Before long their custom of mound building spread all across eastern North America, including areas near the American Bottom.
Late Woodland AD 300-800:
The bow and arrow and the flint hoe were two technological advances of the Late Woodland Period that forever changed the lives of North American Indians. The people who lived in the fertile lands of the American Bottom understood the bow and arrow and used it, but it was the unspectacular hoe that proved to be the key that unlocked their future.
By AD 600 to 800, agriculture had become increasingly important. The farming pioneers of the American Bottom could make the earth bloom each summer with squash, gourds, marshelder, smartweed, maygrass, and eventually corn. Now permanently tied to the land by farming, they had taken the first steps toward developing a great urban-agrarian metropolis along the Mississippi. |