History The Mississippian culture. A North American Bronze Age?

[Lord Sovereign]

Having started to read into the Mound Builders, in particular the Mississippian culture, I'm highly impressed. These chaps had settlements with populations in excess of ten thousand, metal working, advanced agriculture, ritual burials and tombs, and they flourished for centuries. Granted, they were probably building on the traditions of their forebears, and their forebears had been building mounds since the 3000s BC, so these chaps had been flourishing for millennia. In a way, this epoch strikes me as almost a Native American Bronze Age, with probable city states and proto-empires trading and warring with each other. Was a settlement called Cahokia their version of Ur, or Thebes, or Assur?

And it all went tits up very quickly and there wasn't much left by the time the Europeans arrived. Perhaps, if the Bronze Age analogy is accurate, we showed up in the centuries following their Bronze Age collapse, thus arriving a few centuries before their "Neo-Assyria" equivalent restored the old world via butchery (hell, the more troublesome nomadic tribes we ran into could well have been their version of the Sea Peoples, or at least their grandfathers were). Whilst technologically inferior, that would have been a bloody scary empire to go up against for a few hundred frightened colonists, even with firearms and smallpox. As a thought experiment, which people do you chaps think would have been the most likely contender for such a place in history?

Not sure what I wanted to achieve with this thread, but I'm just finding that native cultures (especially in America) were absolutely metal and achieved some remarkable things. I remember one poster on here being utterly sure the Mayan city states had developed so much that they probably had their own Peloponnesian Wars at some point. I personally agree with them.

 

[Bacle]

From what I have seen and read, I think the Mound Builders suffered several large crop failures and droughts in succession, which completely fucked their cities/settlements.

Same thing happened to the people's of the Southwest when they tried to make large settlements for a long period of time; it's is why the Utes and Navajo were semi-nomadic, and weren't living in the old Anasazi ruins like their ancestors.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

From what I have seen and read, I think the Mound Builders suffered several large crop failures and droughts in succession, which completely fucked their cities/settlements.

Same thing happened to the people's of the Southwest when they tried to make large settlements for a long period of time; it's is why the Utes and Navajo were semi-nomadic, and weren't living in the old Anasazi ruins like their ancestors.

Wow. That's pretty much what happened in the late Bronze Age, if you remove the Sea Peoples (which for all we know might not be the case. The ancestors of the Comanche and Apache might have seen the dying civilisation as a very tempting target). It's a grim reminder of just how dependent early civilisation is on the elements working properly for us.

 

[bintananth]

Wow. That's pretty much what happened in the late Bronze Age, if you remove the Sea Peoples (which for all we know might not be the case. The ancestors of the Comanche and Apache might have seen the dying civilisation as a very tempting target). It's a grim reminder of just how dependent early civilisation is on the elements working properly for us.

I've read that a contributing factor to the Bronze Age Collapse was a lack of Tin. That's rarer than Arsenic, which can also be used to make Bronze.

Iron is much more difficult to extract from an ore than Copper. A wood burning fire doesn't burn hot enough to do it. Our ancestors needed to figure out how to make charcoal before the Iron Age could start.

 

[ATP]

From what I have seen and read, I think the Mound Builders suffered several large crop failures and droughts in succession, which completely fucked their cities/settlements.

Same thing happened to the people's of the Southwest when they tried to make large settlements for a long period of time; it's is why the Utes and Navajo were semi-nomadic, and weren't living in the old Anasazi ruins like their ancestors.

Yes,and they have strong priest castle/caste,sorry/ which claimed to control it and probably made human sacrifises..It is probable,that after few bad seazons survivors just butchered priests and start living primitive way.

 

[bintananth]

Yes,and they have strong priest castle which claimed to control it and probably made human sacrifises..It is probable,that after few bad seazons survivors just butchered priests and start living primitive way.

I think you're mistaking "castle" for "caste". A castle is a large fortified building designed to repel attacks and withstand a siege. A caste is a hereditary social class someone is born into.

I got your meaning, so I'm chalking that up to either a typo or autocorrect being stupid and inadaquate.

 

[Sailor.X]

My Tribe was the Eastern most branch of that Culture.