20.8 America: a.d. 501 to 600

America

North america

Back to America: A.D. 401 to 500

Canada and the far north

See previous chapters and 9th century C.E. , as well as Europe: A.D. 501 to 600 .

The united states

The Mississippian Culture of Mound Builders, which now replaced the decaying Hopewell Culture, flowered along the Mississippi River and other river systems of the south.

Archaeologists do not agree about its origin. Some attribute it to the migration of ideas from Mexico or Central America and it is true that some of the sophisticated art does resemble Middle American. But even more of the art seems to have had roots in Adena or Hopewell and current thinking treats the Mississippian as an indigenous culture, an outgrowth of the Hopewell blended with late arriving Mexican elements. The characteristic feature of the culture is the pyramidal mound serving as a foundation for a temple or a chief's house. Some centers were very small but others were gigantic, as Cahokia at East St. Louis, Illinois, where there were more than 85 mounds and a village area that extended for six miles along the Ohio River. One of the largest of the mounds was about 100 feet high and its base covered 16 acres. The immensity of the labor involved, without the use of wheels or beasts of burden, is almost unbelievable. The entire enterprise may have taken several hundreds of years. The Mississippian population was dense in that at least 383 villages bordered the Mississippi River in the short distance of about 700 miles between points of entrance of the Ohio and Red rivers respectively and there were thousands of other villages up and down the other parts of the river system. (Ref. 64 )

If we are to believe Professor Fell (Ref. 66 ) Libyan science and mathematics continued to flourish in the southwest. The Hohokam continued their colonizing migrations, beginning their colonial period sometime after 550, spreading artifacts over most of Arizona and taking with them their customs, including the sacred ball-game. Farther northeast the Anasazi or Pueblo Builders, continued advancement with better pottery designs and increased trade, importing abalone shells and turquoise. (Ref. 269 ) From a source still unknown they obtained the bow and arrow and they developed the hafted ax. Agriculture increased with the cultivation of better corn, squash and beans, which added protein to their diet. Their population then soared and their settlements spread so that they even had pit houses in the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. (Ref. 277 )

Mexico, central america, and the caribbean

Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico was at the height of its power and was larger than imperial Rome, some estimating the population at 125,000 with an area of 20 square kilometers. (Ref. 8 ) It was a religious and cultural capital and a major economic and political center for Middle America. Its power extended widely with intermingling of tribes and cultures, so that there was a strong Mexican presence even at Kaminaljuyu (now Guatemala City). Even the lowland Maya region, as at Tikal, had Teotihuacan artistic traditions, although Tikal was only one-fifth as large as the Mexican city.