4 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 195 



or via the land route of the Southwest and northern Mexico, which 

 would show how these exotic ideas reached the Southeast. It appears, 

 rather, that certain basic Middle American ideas, once they were im- 

 planted among the Indians of the Southeast, developed there without 

 additional stimulus. 



Mysterious in its origins, the decline of this advanced culture is also 

 imperfectly understood. Although De Soto and a few other very 

 early explorers viewed Middle Mississippi culture before the great 

 fortress towns and ceremonial centers had been abandoned, this culture 

 seems to have passed its peak before the arrival of the Wliite man. 

 The coming of European explorers, traders, and colonists and the 

 population displacement, tribal warfare, and disease which resulted 

 merely hastened the fall of this once flourishing civilization. 



N"o single tribe or linguistic group can be credited with Middle 

 Mississippi culture. It was rather the product of many different tribes 

 and linguistic groups. Among the historic tribes which were, at the 

 time of their discovery, participants in this culture were the Cherokee, 

 Chickasaw, Choctaw, and the numerous tribes of the Creek Confeder- 

 acy. It was no mere accident that their descendants became known to 

 the Wliites as the "Five Civilized Tribes." They were carrying on, in 

 their tribal life, many features derived from Middle Mississippi cul- 

 ture. Furthermore, their own relative advancement made it easier for 

 them to adopt features of the newly introduced European civilization. 



Other participants in the Middle Mississippi culture were the Cad- 

 doan tribes of the Central and Southern Plains and certain groups 

 speaking languages of the Siouan linguistic stock. Apparently these 

 Siouan-speaking groups, migrating out of the Southeast and receiving 

 new cultural stimuli during their movements, carried Middle Missis- 

 sippi ideas into the Prairie region. 



Among these Siouan speakers were groups which became known in 

 historic times as the Mandan tribe. Famous for their fortified earth- 

 lodge villages, intensive horticulture, and spectacular ceremonies di- 

 rected by a priestly hierarchy, the members of this tribe became known 

 as the "gentlemanly Mandan" to traders and explorers on the Missouri. 

 They introduced their semisedentary way of life to many other groups 

 in the Northern Plains, including the Hidatsa, and in late historic 

 times, one division of the Dakota or Sioux. 



Farther south, in the Central Plains, were tribes of the ^Sgiha and 

 Chiwere divisions of the Siouan language family. The ^Sgiha-sipeak- 

 ing tribes were the Ponca, Omaha, Osage, Kansa, and Quapaw, and 

 the Chiwere groups were the Iowa, Oto, and Missouri. Like the 

 Mandan, these "Southern Siouans" brought with them to the Plains 

 certain advanced ideas derived from the Middle Mississippi centers in 

 the Southeast, such as an agricultural way of life, a social and religious 



