Between AD 900 and 1600 a series of stable and prosperous Native American cultures were centered on the major river valleys of the Midwest and Southeast. Collectively, scholars refer to these cultures and their material remains as Mississippian because the culture seems to have originated along the Mississippi River valley. The fertile river valleys of Alabama's Black Belt provided an ideal environment for Mississippian communities to develop. It was in these river valleys that towns were established. Some of these, such as the Moundville site on the Black Warrior River, were large stockaded towns that served as capitals of regional chiefdoms. With their monumental earthen mounds and plazas, Mississippian towns formed the focus for Native American political, social, and ceremonial life in this period. Political life was based on the chiefdom, in which a chief and his relatives controlled political power. The economic basis for most of these Mississippian communities was flood-plain agriculture. Corn (or maize) was the dominant crop, however other plants such as beans, squash, sump weed and sunflowers were also cultivated. This agricultural diet was then supplemented with hunting and fishing. Moundville, capital of the Black Warrior, was the second largest Native American ceremonial center of the Mississippian Period. This political and religious capital was surpassed in size only by a similar site at Cahokia, Illinois. Moundville was a walled community constructed around AD 1100 and reached its zenith around AD 1200. By this time, the great Cahokia chiefdom had declined making Moundville the largest city north of Mexico in the thirteenth century. In addition to the mounds, the community included the homes of artists, skilled craft persons, farmers, hunters, fishermen, aristocrats, and priests. The mounds themselves served as platforms to elevate temples and the homes of Moundville's rulers. In its heyday, Moundville was not only the political capital of a large chiefdom stretching from present- day Tuscaloosa to Demopolis, but it was also a regional ceremonial center serving as a site for important life ceremonies as well as the funerals of an extended population. In the Mississippian Period these ancient Native Americans possessed one of the richest culture of any group in eastern North America. The Moundville people and other Southeastern Native Americans created a complex political and social order, and expressed religious beliefs through the construction of large ceremonial centers and numerous monumental earthen mounds. They also possessed a sophisticated system of symbols, and crafted elaborate works of art in varied styles. Far from living in isolation, the Moundville people were participants in warfare, the exchange of knowledge of the supernatural, and a vast trading network that stretched across eastern North America. By the time the Spaniard Hernando de Soto arrived in Alabama in AD 1540, the city was mostly abandoned, its population dispersed to other chiefdoms. During the 150 years following the entry of the Spanish, the remaining Mississippian chiefdoms broke down under the pressure of disease and social disruption brought about by European incursions. By the late seventeenth century, the remnants of these chiefdoms coalesced into the tribal identities that we know today as the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole). In the years after the American Revolution, settlers began to cross the Appalachians and settle on lands that had been guaranteed to the Five Civilized Tribes by treaty. These incursions were not accepted peacefully. After a few military successes, the Muskogee/Creeks and their allies were defeated in Alabama at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, with the loss of approximately 800 men. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend marks the historical moment when the United States permanently broke the political and military power of the Southeastern tribes. The U.S. Congress later passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, forcing the tribes to give up their lands east of the Mississippi River in return for lands in what are now the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma. While many Native Americans managed to escape this initial removal, thousands of Southeastern Indians were later forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River by 1839, over the "Trail of Tears." Many of the over half-million modern descendants of the Mississippians are once again creating beautiful baskets and ceramics, as well as shell and stone patterns that are directly traceable to the artists of ancient Cahokia, Etowah, Moundville, and Spiro. Every fall season at Moundville, where only twenty of the original thirty mounds remain, the descendants of the creators of this remarkable site display the results of their sophisticated artistry, and celebrate their past, and their future, in the living presence of their ancestors and in the shadow of the ancient mounds.