The Mississippian Period is divided into three chronological sections which are:

Early Mississippian phase  (1000 - 1200 CE) which is the transition from the late Woodland period way of life. People abandon tribal life for the agriculture, centralization, complexity and sedentaristic ways of the mound societies.

Middle Mississippian phase  (1200 - 1400 CE) which is the apex of the mound era and includes great metropolitans, ceremonial complexes, formation of complex chiefdoms and the development and spread of the ceremonial art.

Late Mississippian phase  (1400 - 1600 CE) is characterized by increasing warfare, increasing defensive structures, political turmoil, decline in mound building, decline in ceremonialism and increasing population movement. The period ended with European contact in the 16th century.

The Mississippian Period consists of six major contemporary cultures, all of which were related by an extensive trade network.

The Lower Appalachian Mississippian area sites are distributed across a contiguous area including Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, South Carolina, central and western North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Chronologically this area became influenced by Mississippian culture later than the Middle Mississippian area (about 1000 CE as compared to 800 CE) to its northwest. It is believed that the peoples of this area adopted Mississippian traits from their northwestern neighbors.

Typical settlements were located on riverine flood plains and included villages with defensive palisades enclosing platform mounds and residential areas.

Probably the most prominent examples of the the Lower Appalachian settlements of the Mississipian Period cultures are Etowah site and Ocmulgee site, both of which are located in Georgia.

The Lower Mississippian culture was an archaeological culture of people who lived along the lower Mississippi River Valley in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana.

Lower Mississippian culture was contemporaneous with the Middle Mississippian culture in the Cahokia site near East St. Louis, Illinois.

The Lower Mississippian Culture is considered ancestral to the Natchez and Taensa peoples.

The term Middle Mississippian is those who live in the core of the classic Mississippian culture area. This area covers the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the Mid-South area, including western and central Kentucky, western Tennessee, and northern Alabama and Mississippi.

Sites in this area often contain large ceremonial platform mounds, residential complexes and are often encircled by earthen ditches and ramparts or palisades.

The Middle Mississippian Culture is very influential on neighboring societies. High status artifacts from Cahokia have been found far outside of Middle Mississippian area. These items, especially the pottery are copied by many artist of other cultures.

The Cohokia site is the largest, the most complex and the most influential of all site of the Mississippian Period culture.

Fort Ancient is a culture of native people who inhabited land along the Ohio River in areas of modern-day southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana and western West Virginia. They were a maize growing agricultural society who lived in sedentary villages and built ceremonial platform mounds.

The Fort Ancient culture was once thought to have been an expansion of the Mississippian cultures but is now accepted as an independently developed culture that descended from the Hopewell culture.

The Fort Ancient Culture's most famous mound is called the serpent mound.

The upper Mississippian cultue (Oneota) is a cultural complex in the eastern plains and area west of the Great Lakes. The culture is believed to have transitioned into various Macro-Siouan cultures of the proto-historic and historic times, such as the Ioway.

Oneota is considered a major component of Upper Mississippian culture. It is characterized by globular, shell-tempered pottery that is often coarse in fibre. Pieces often had a spherical body, short necks and/or a flat lip. Sometimes the vessels had strap handles. Decoration includes wavy and zigzag lines, often in parallel. Most decoration was done on the top half of the vessel.

The Oneota diet included corn, beans, and squash, wild rice, nuts, fish, deer, and bison, however, this varied according to the region and locale.

The Caddoan Mississippian area, a regional variant of the Mississippian culture, covered a large territory, including what is now eastern Oklahoma, western Arkansas, northeastern Texas, and northwestern Louisiana. Archaeological evidence has led to a scholarly consensus that the cultural continuity is unbroken from prehistory to the present, and that the Caddo people and the related Caddo language speakers in prehistoric times as well as at first European contact, are the direct ancestors of the modern Caddo Nation of Oklahoma.

The ancestors of the Caddo native Americans were agriculturalist whose distinctive way of life and material culture emerged sometime before 800 CE, and expanded into what are now archeological sites in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

The Caddoan Culture are believe to have developed from the Middle Mississippian Woodland Period cultures of the Fourche Maline, Mill Creek and Mossy Grove people who lived in the area prior to the Caddoan culture.

By 900 CE early Caddoan society began to coalesce into one of the earlier Mississippian cultures. Some villages began to gain prominence as ritual centers, with elite residences and temple mound constructions. The mounds were arranged around open plazas, which were usually kept swept clean and were often used for ceremonial occasions. As complex religious and social ideas developed, some people and family lineages gained prominence over others. This hierarchical structure is marked in the archaeological record by the appearance of large tombs with exotic grave offerings of obvious symbols of authority and prestige.

By 1000 CE, major sites as Spiro on the Arkansas river valley and the Battle Mound Site along the Red River Valley, become the largest and most fertile areas in the Caddoan region, with productive maize agriculture.

The Caddoans develope a distinct type of pottery making, later described by the de Soto expedition as some of the finest they had seen, even in their European homeland.

By 1200, the numerous villages, hamlets, and farmsteads established throughout the Caddo world had begun extensive maize agriculture.

The climate west of the woodlands was drier, hindering maize production, and those population closer to the western plains were assured that there would be fewer neighboring chiefdoms with whom to compete and contend with.

By 1400 CE, Caddoan populations had peaked, with many ritual centers beginning to decline in population after which a more dispersed settlement system developed, with the bulk of the people living on dispersed homesteads and farms rather than in large villages. By this time the earlier broad cultural unity began to break down, with many distinct local variations developing.

When the European expedition lead by Hernando de Soto crossed into the region where the Caddo had made their homeland, arriving on the scene in 1542, they found thriving communities of these indigenous people distributed along the banks of the Arkansas, Brazos, Ouachita, Nueces, Red, Sabine, Trinity and other rivers.

These native Americans played important economic and diplomatic roles during the colonial era throughout the 1600s and 1700s. Following that, the Caddo people suffered hardships when the United States government removed them to reservation during the 1800s, first in Texas and later in Oklahoma.

Today, the Caddo Nation is headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma and now, this indigenous people have developed a unique and proud economic, social, political and religious heritage, while maintaining their distinctive identity and wish to build forward to a prosperous future.

There is a unique and extensive museum that highlights these people, there history and culture at: Monah Museum, 202 SW O Street, Bentonville, AR 72712