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Transformations in Mississippian Native American Culture
by Jabe Fincher This article is published with the kind permission of the author. Jabe Fincher examines the loss of the Mississippian platform mounds, one of the transformed cultural elements of Mississippian Native American culture.
At least 300 years separate the Mississippian cultures from the best ethnographic descriptions of their descendants, the historic southeastern Indians. A major transformation took place across this span of time. Inadequate documents and archaeological information make it difficult to determine the precise nature of these changes. But much of the result can be explained by the term "deculturation"-a loss of cultural elements, including, it is assumed much of the Mississippian mythology, beliefs, and ceremonialism. One of the cultural elements long assumed to have been lost during this transformation was the platform mound, which is a sort of identifying feature of the Mississippian era. The nature and symbolism of Mississippian platform mounds still remains largely a mystery. A few ethnologists have noticed certain features in southeastern ritual that seem relevant to the problem of the Mississippian mounds. It appears, in fact, that although Indians of the historic era were no longer building large mounds, the beliefs underlying the practice survived. When viewed at the level of symbolism the problem dissolves, and the "loss" of platform mound ceremonialism can be seen as merely a change of emphasis within an unbroken ritual tradition. This imagery of people coming from a hollow in a mound is analogous to several Muskogee texts in which ancestors come from the underground. A Tuckabatchee example compares this emergence to ants pouring out of the earth, presumable from an anthill, which substitutes for the mound in the Kasihta example. The motif of a great mound with a hollow chamber in its center appears again in Choctaw origin and migration mythology. In certain accounts, the large platform mound at Nanih Waiya in Winston County, Mississippi was considered as the "great mother" of the Choctaw tribe. "In the very center of the mound, they say, ages ago, the Great Spirit created the first Choctaws and through a hole or cave, they crawled forth into the light of day. Large earth mounds, then, of recognizable Mississippian form and structure, were far from ignored or forgotten among the historic southeastern Indians. Material (linguistic and traditional) from Muskogee, Yuchi, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee sources yield a reasonably coherent picture of mounds as symbols. The mounds possess symbolic association with the underworld, fertility, birth, death, burial, and the placation of spirits, emergence, purification, and supernatural protection. It is true that Euro-American influences effected social and economic changes among the Choctaw (and the other tribes), but archaeological evidence also shows that cultural and social changes were beginning before the advent of the white man in the Southeast. Resource
Knight, Vernon James, Jr., "Symbolism of Mississippi Mounds" University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 1995.
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