Mississippi civilisation?

I was thinking of creating a timeline involving a great civilisation starting on the Mississippi river sometime around 3000-2000BC. Does anyone have any good ideas about how this would develop? I am wondering whether it would be similar to the Mohenjo-Daro civilisation, flourishing and then disappearing (without knowing what happened to it, and barely knowing any of its culture) or the way of Egypt, with a monarchy lasting thousands of years. If so, and there was a Mississippi civilisation at that time, would this arise a history of America similar to the Mediterranean?
 
I was thinking of creating a timeline involving a great civilisation starting on the Mississippi river sometime around 3000-2000BC. Does anyone have any good ideas about how this would develop? I am wondering whether it would be similar to the Mohenjo-Daro civilisation, flourishing and then disappearing (without knowing what happened to it, and barely knowing any of its culture) or the way of Egypt, with a monarchy lasting thousands of years. If so, and there was a Mississippi civilisation at that time, would this arise a history of America similar to the Mediterranean?

The type of thing, I think your talking about is the Mississippian tribes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture which began around 800 AD.

As you see with Inca, Aztecs, Inuits and other native american tribes, is that their cultures at the begining were not based on building cities as no-madic fitted the lifestyle, enviroment and ecosystem of the Americans.

Historians believe that the mediterranean civilizations developed quick as this was where the first homosapiens were able to live in communites, as the spread of humans started in Africa, going up to the middle east splitting between Europe and Asia.
And it was the Asian ancestors who travelled to Northern America, so having humans in America in 3000 BC all depends on how quickly homosapians are able to evolve, spread and settle.
 
I am wondering whether it would be similar to the Mohenjo-Daro civilisation, flourishing and then disappearing (without knowing what happened to it, and barely knowing any of its culture)

That's basically what happened to the Mississippi civilization OTL, although to be fair their history wasn't particularly brief.
 
The type of thing, I think your talking about is the Mississippian tribes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture which began around 800 AD.

As you see with Inca, Aztecs, Inuits and other native american tribes, is that their cultures at the begining were not based on building cities as no-madic fitted the lifestyle, enviroment and ecosystem of the Americans.

Historians believe that the mediterranean civilizations developed quick as this was where the first homosapiens were able to live in communites, as the spread of humans started in Africa, going up to the middle east splitting between Europe and Asia.
And it was the Asian ancestors who travelled to Northern America, so having humans in America in 3000 BC all depends on how quickly homosapians are able to evolve, spread and settle.

There's...quite a bit of almost-information there. Not meaning to be rude, but it needs brushing up.

Humans were present in the Americas at 3000 BC; the current scientific consensus is that they arrived roughly 15,000 years ago but there have been more and more instances of sites dating back to 20 or even 30,000 years ago.

The first humans known to live in large sedentary communities (and set the trend) were in Mesopotamia, not the Mediterranean. As far as 'communities' themselves go, these were present before sedentism, or even modern humans existed.

The Inca, Aztecs, (even Inuit technically) are not tribes, but many different groups of people (this includes tribes) under one polity (or in the case of the Incas, four states, and in the case of the Inuit a common culture and heritage). The commonly documented civilization-building cultures (everywhere) didn't just spring civilization out of nowhere, but were succeeding iterations of various cultures before them, building upon their knowledge. Sedentism and semi-sedentism was actually very popular in much of the Americas.


But yeah, to the OP: an earlier Mississippian culture evolution is your best bet. Read up on how they formed and try to get those events done earlier. Try to get the Eastern Agricultural package developed way earlier than OTL, say, 6-8,000 BC. Their goosefoot would wind up a very efficient cereal crop; this along with other crops from this package faded out as the Mesoamerican package spread northward.

That's basically what happened to the Mississippi civilization OTL, although to be fair their history wasn't particularly brief.

They actually were still kicking around and quite active by the time de Soto showed up -- the changing climate and the loss of Cahokia sort of threw the entire region into a sort of 'dark age', but the Eastern Woodlands were still brimming with complex, stratified polities. (of course, what happened AFTER de Soto showed up is another story...)
 
Keep in mind that any speculative history of an early advanced civilization equivalent in scope to the early Indus Valley civilizations arising in the Mississippi basin 2,000-3,000 BC is so far from the realm of actual developments (and identification with known historical groups) that you have a lot of latitude to imagine all sorts of things, regardless of whether it was a "vanished civilization" or one that continued to evolve and develop to influence later civilizations developing elsewhere in north and central america.

Some logical necessities:

(1) Since maize, beans, and squash were much later imports from mesoamerica, the civilization has to be based on an early development and intensification of eastern woodland cultigens (amaranth, sunflower, etc) and most importantly you need to explain why this intensification was necessary...create some climate change or something that made it necessary. There are also issues about whether the eastern agricultural complex could have supported OTL's Mississippian flourescence in the first millenia AD, not to mention a much more advanced civilization 3000 years earlier, so this is the toughest hurdle to get past.

(2) To be considered a truly advanced civilization, you need some form of writing to evolve. How and why do they do this? calendrical needs? almanacs? trade records? tribute and conquest records? What sort of system is it?

(3) What will prompt the evolution of a true state-level society (one with kings, bureaucrats, military orders, etc) from a simple farming and hunting subsistence? Why do the people submit to authority? Constrained environments?

(4) Domestic animals. Not really essential, but cool to think about. Are there animals that might be domesticated for food or as beast of burden. Explore the feasibility of semi-domestic deer herding, bison herding, etc. Maybe domesticated beaver, black bear, who knows?

(5) If the civilization vanishes, why? and why didn't it influence later developments anyway?

(6) If you have it survive and continue to evolve, you can basically rewrite the entire prehistory and history of north and central america from 2000 BC on. No need to work any contemporary or historical groups from our timeline (Aztecs, Olmecs, Pueblo, Natchez, Iroquois, Anasazi, whatever) into the narrative, since they will have been butterflied away or significantly altered by all the massive changes emanating from the great civilization that developed in the Mississippi Valley. Fun stuff.

But by now, your are really writing a historical fantasy as much as an alternate history.
 
They actually were still kicking around and quite active by the time de Soto showed up -- the changing climate and the loss of Cahokia sort of threw the entire region into a sort of 'dark age', but the Eastern Woodlands were still brimming with complex, stratified polities. (of course, what happened AFTER de Soto showed up is another story...)

They were still around, but I was under the impression that with regards to the OP, they collapsed soon after de Soto for relatively unknown reasons, and we also don't know much about its culture despite the survival of several mound builder cultures well into the history of the United States. I've heard hypotheses for the Mississippian collapse, but I haven't heard of any consensus on the matter.
 
To be considered a truly advanced civilization, you need some form of writing to evolve. How and why do they do this? calendrical needs? almanacs? trade records? tribute and conquest records? What sort of system is it?
People around the Great Lakes (and Plains Indians near the Great Lakes such as the Sioux) used simple ideograms/logograms to record short stories and information (these same symbols were also used in winter counts), and the Ojibwe had(has) a sort of secret society using a variant of this to record tribal information and myths. They seem to have arisen from a visual interpretation of Native American sign language along with pictographs -- getting this to appear much, much earlier on like agriculture in this hypothetical timeline could help it turn into something like the Vinca symbols or Anatolian script.
(4) Domestic animals. Not really essential, but cool to think about. Are there animals that might be domesticated for food or as beast of burden. Explore the feasibility of semi-domestic deer herding, bison herding, etc. Maybe domesticated beaver, black bear, who knows?
Yeah, notice a trend in history -- every single cultural region that has had access to any type of large domestic animal has progressed phenomenally faster politically, technologically and sometimes even culturally than any civilization without them. Since we're on the subject, take the Americas for an example -- North America took a long time for large organized cities and civilization to crop up and even then took a while for said cities to unite under various forms of government, whereas South America has had civilization since 3500 BC. The difference between the two continents? The presence of llamas. The two superpowered domestic animals of the Old World that are the horse and cow allowed civilizations there to skyrocket past their peers and practically dominate the planet, culturally speaking.
(6) If you have it survive and continue to evolve, you can basically rewrite the entire prehistory and history of north and central america from 2000 BC on. No need to work any contemporary or historical groups from our timeline (Aztecs, Olmecs, Pueblo, Natchez, Iroquois, Anasazi, whatever) into the narrative, since they will have been butterflied away or significantly altered by all the massive changes emanating from the great civilization that developed in the Mississippi Valley. Fun stuff.
If you wanted to, you might be able to keep the Mesoamerican civilizations relatively untouched; the Americas tend to be geographically isolating like that. Especially if you make this earlier Mississippian civilization a more isolationist culture, but seeing as how they're so close to the Gulf and an 'advanced' civilization near a large river is more than likely to have some acceptably decent maritime technology it would be very difficult to keep them from interacting with their southern neighbors.

The Anasazi/Pueblo cultures though I can probably see being mostly out of the loop, but contact can still come from a butterflied Mesoamerica northwards into Oasisamerica. What would change if at all would depend on the nature of this Mississippi civilization.
They were still around, but I was under the impression that with regards to the OP, they collapsed soon after de Soto for relatively unknown reasons, and we also don't know much about its culture despite the survival of several mound builder cultures well into the history of the United States. I've heard hypotheses for the Mississippian collapse, but I haven't heard of any consensus on the matter.
The answer to that is quite obvious, really; the introduction of European diseases after de Soto pretty much wrecked most of the Mississippian culture; the survivors spread out and adopted new lives, and some took advantage of the newly introduced Spanish horses as well. Aside from the information we got from the Natchez, the records from de Soto's expeditions do provide some pretty useful information on the structures of Mississippian polities, such as Cofitachequi.
 
The answer to that is quite obvious, really; the introduction of European diseases after de Soto pretty much wrecked most of the Mississippian culture; the survivors spread out and adopted new lives, and some took advantage of the newly introduced Spanish horses as well. Aside from the information we got from the Natchez, the records from de Soto's expeditions do provide some pretty useful information on the structures of Mississippian polities, such as Cofitachequi.

Huh. I've heard that the introduction of European diseases destroyed the Mississippian civilization, but I was led to understand that researchers were unsure if that was the only or primary cause. Thanks for that!
 
Travel

Would it be possible, for a European civilization to travel acros unknowingly, and establish some sort of settlement, working with the natives and teaching them new techs? Some sort of empire might evolve. :)
 
Would it be possible, for a European civilization to travel acros unknowingly, and establish some sort of settlement, working with the natives and teaching them new techs? Some sort of empire might evolve. :)

  • That's actually OTL, if you think about it. Twice. The whole 'working with the natives' thing never really worked out though in either instance; the notions of assisting the seemingly less-than-human Skraelings/indioes with building empires that might have just stood in the way of conquest and religion-spreading apparently were not that popular.
  • The Atlantic might be considered smallish compared to the Pacific but it's still pretty huge, huge enough for expeditions to require lots of money. An ancient/pre-Age of Sail ship 'unknowingly' crossing the Atlantic is like Yuri Gagarin 'accidentally' winding up on Mars.
  • Getting a ship to survive blue-water conditions is a huge logistical hurdle. The older pre-exploration green water ships could navigate near the coasts of the Mediterranean just fine, but the open seas were just really dangerous and you risked destroying your ship. An Asian junk could probably get the job done*, but not the adrift ship of any European civilization that could get an empire built before Columbus comes.
  • An empire might very well evolve -- that is, if you somehow manage to have these European migrants free from any and all diseases that ravaged Europe until recently; the diseases that decimated 90% of the native American population.

    *If you're just looking for people from any ol' Old World civilization getting lost in, and building empires in, the Americas I strongly suggest The Horse and the Jaguar.
 
Would it be possible, for a European civilization to travel acros unknowingly, and establish some sort of settlement, working with the natives and teaching them new techs? Some sort of empire might evolve. :)

Possible, but virtually impossible in the 2,000-3,000 BC time frame, especially if you are trying to establish a high civilization in the Mississippi valley. There are gobs of interesting speculations on this Board about old-world/new-world contacts.
 
If you wanted to, you might be able to keep the Mesoamerican civilizations relatively untouched; the Americas tend to be geographically isolating like that. Especially if you make this earlier Mississippian civilization a more isolationist culture, but seeing as how they're so close to the Gulf and an 'advanced' civilization near a large river is more than likely to have some acceptably decent maritime technology it would be very difficult to keep them from interacting with their southern neighbors...

The Anasazi/Pueblo cultures though I can probably see being mostly out of the loop, but contact can still come from a butterflied Mesoamerica northwards into Oasisamerica. What would change if at all would depend on the nature of this Mississippi civilization..

Good points. However if an advanced civilization (or even a cultural complex involving a series of related civilizations) evolved 2,000-3,000BC in the Mississippi Valley and survived to the period of european contact, this is something that never occurred in the OTL new world. There would be no "dark ages" or periods of decline. Extensive and long-lasting networks of trade, conquest, political dominance, and influence would spread far and wide, and remain intact for millenia. Even if this civilization did not seek to dominate North America (including MesoAmerica), it would, simply because it pre-existed the other incipient centers of civilization and remained in existence and was more advanced than the other cultures evolving along its margins. The movement of peoples and spread of ideas would be affected by this center, and their cultures would mirror or react to it. In such a situation, there is no reason to presume that it wouldn't spread trade and conquest tendrils through the southern plains into the US Southwest long before Mexican civilizations arose to do the same. In fact, trade and contact south into Mexico itself would probably radically alter the evolution and nature of Mexican civilizations...I am imagining something like a civilization with the technological and socio-political level of early Rome arriving in Veracruz just as the Olmecs getting underway.
South America would likely remain free to develop on its own trajectory largely identical to OTL.
 
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