page_title: History of Mississippi
section_title: Native Americans
hierarchical_section_title: History of Mississippi / Native Americans
caption_attribution_description: English: An artists conception of the Holly Bluff Site, sometimes known as the Lake George Site, a Plaquemine Mississippian culture ceremonial mound site in Yazoo County, Mississippi, USA
context_page_description: The history of the state of Mississippi extends to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; the Europeans recorded accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
  The first European explorers to settle in the area of the present-day state were French colonists, and later some Spanish and English, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Euro-Americans did not enter the territory in great number until the early nineteenth century, and then they brought many enslaved Afro-Americans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River.
context_section_description: At the end of the last Ice Age, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is the Southern United States. Paleo-Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the megafauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. A variety of indigenous cultures arose in the region, including some that built great earthwork mounds more than 2,000 years ago.
  The successive mound building Troyville, Coles Creek, and Plaquemine cultures occupied western Mississippi bordering the Mississippi River during the Late Woodland period. During the Terminal Coles Creek period (1150 to 1250 CE) contact increased with Mississippian cultures centered upriver near St. Louis, Missouri. This led to the adaption of new pottery techniques,  as well as new ceremonial objects and possibly new forms of social structuring. As more Mississippian culture influences were absorbed the Plaquemine area as a distinct culture began to shrink after 1350 CE. Eventually the last enclave of purely Plaquemine culture was the Natchez Bluffs area, while the Yazoo Basin and adjacent areas of Louisiana became a hybrid Plaquemine-Mississippian culture. Historic groups in the area during first European contact bear out this division. In the Natchez Bluffs, the Taensa and Natchez had held out against Mississippian influence and continued to use the same sites as their ancestors and carry on the Plaquemine culture. Groups who appear to have absorbed more Mississippian influence were identified at the time of European contact as those tribes speaking the Tunican, Chitimachan, and Muskogean languages.
  The Mississippian culture disappeared in most places around the time of European encounter. Archaeological and linguistic evidence has shown their descendants are the historic Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples, who were later counted by colonists as among the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Other tribes who inhabited the territory that became known as Mississippi (and whose names were given by colonists to local towns and features) include the Natchez, Yazoo, Pascagoula, and the Biloxi. French, Spanish and English colonists all traded with these tribes in the early colonial years.
  Pressure from European-American settlers increased during the early nineteenth century, after invention of the cotton gin made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. This was readily cultivated in the upland areas of the South, and its development could feed an international demand for cotton in the 19th century. Migrants from the United States entered Mississippi mostly from the north and east, coming from the Upper South and coastal areas. Eventually they gained passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which achieved federal forced removal of most of the indigenous peoples during the 1830s to areas west of the Mississippi River.
caption: Holly Bluff Site, located in Yazoo County, Mississippi
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