Pre-Columbian Era - History - North America - Middle Archaic Period

Middle Archaic Period

As early as 6500 BCE, people in the Lower Mississippi Valley at the Monte Sano site were building complex earthwork mounds to express their religious ceremonies and cosmology. This is the earliest dated mound of numerous sites of mound complexes found in present-day Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, from thousands of years before the construction of pyramids in Egypt. Since the late twentieth century, archeologists have explored and dated these sites. They have found that they were built by hunter-gatherer societies, whose people occupied the sites on a seasonal basis, and who had not yet developed ceramics. Watson Brake, a large complex of eleven platform mounds, was constructed beginning in 3400 BCE and added to over 500 years. This has changed earlier assumptions that complex construction arose only after societies had adopted agriculture, become sedentary, often developed stratified hierarchy, and generally also developed ceramics. These ancient people had organized to build complex mound projects from a different basis.

Read more about this topic:  Pre-Columbian Era, History, North America

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