THE MOUND BUILDERS

Timing was everything for Christopher Columbus and the handful of Europeans who initially followed in his wake after the Italian explorer “sailed the ocean blue in 1492.” Had such bold men crossed the Atlantic a scant seven decades earlier, they would have encountered, instead of scattered, primitive tribes, a civilization more than capable of halting their European intrusion into the New World.

For more than a millennium the interconnected peoples of the Mississippian culture built cities, warred and traded across the trail systems and rivers lacing what today is the eastern half of the United States. The loose confederation comprised upward of 3