The network of maize-farming, mound-building societies that flourished across the river valleys of the southeastern and midwestern United States from roughly 800 to 1600 CE. Not a single empire but a shared world of ranked chiefdoms, monumental earthworks, and common religious imagery, the Mississippian culture produced the most populous and politically complex Native societies north of Mexico. Its largest center was the city of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis. Many Mississippian centers rose and declined over centuries before Europeans arrived, and the peoples did not vanish: their descendants include the Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other Native nations of the American Southeast.
Across the American South and Midwest stand thousands of earthen mounds, including the flat-topped platforms of Mississippian towns, some as tall as a six-story building, built by hand basket-load by basket-load. On their summits once sat temples and the houses of chiefs; below them stretched open plazas where whole towns gathered. The people who raised them grew maize on a scale that fed dense, ranked societies, traded shell and copper across half a continent, and shared a striking body of religious imagery. They were the most complex societies north of Mexico, and most Americans educated outside the region have never heard the word for them. They did not disappear. Their descendants are the Native nations of the Southeast today, which makes the old colonial image of an empty or vanished America a myth.