2.21 America: a.d. 701 to 800

America

Back to America: A.D. 601 to 700

North america

The far north and canada

The Dorset Arctic Culture continued its many centuries of existence in the far north. Additional details will be given in the next chapter. We have little definitive information about the Canadian Indian tribes at this particularly period, but certainly the far western groups continued as previously and may well have been the sending-off point for the Polynesian migrations into the Pacific.

The united states

"The scale and flamboyance of Mississipian social dwarfed anything known before in North America."

The central and lower Mississippi cultures were centered between St. Louis and Memphis but spread to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alabama and was still in existence when the Spanish came with the white man's diseases. The Encyclopedia of Archeology (Ref. 45 ) says that the new traits of this culture were:

• Rectangular, flat topped mounds used for temple bases
• New pottery - using pulverized shell for temper with new shapes and decorations
• Maize, as the chief crop

The historic Indian tribes of the plains such as the Pawnee, Osage, and Arikara, for example, perpetuated the mixed horticultural and bison hunting economy of the previous 800 to 1,000 years. Some of their ancestors' large villages have been excavated along the Missouri and its tributaries. (Ref. 88 )

The Colonial Period of the Hohokam continued in the southwest. Their ball courts varied greatly in size from 20 meters to over 100 meters in length. Some believe they were used for the religious Meso-American style ball games but others believe they were stages for a dance. (Ref. 269 ) According to the remaining available arrow heads, it was sometime between 700 and 900 that the bow and arrow began to be used, rather than the spear, by the Mogollon tribes. These people, first to use pottery in the southwest, developed increasing skill in this endeavor, as they made it by coiling and scraping, not with a pottery wheel. In northern Arizona and New Mexico the Anasazi Culture now shifted from the Basket-maker into the Pueblo Period, with five sub-divisions extending up to modern times. The Pueblo I period lasted two centuries from A.D. 700 to 900, with their pottery showing some strange new shapes, including some made to look like birds. (Ref. 66 , 210 , 88 ) Masonry rubble in the Chaco Canyon suggests a gradual shift to ground-level construction of multi-roomed houses which were the first pueblos. It was at this time that the Anasazi mothers started strapping their babies to hard, wooden cradleboards producing flattening of the back of their heads. Kivas became focal points of community and religious practices. (Ref. 252 ).