Mississippian Life, an original painting, Copyright Susan A. Walton, S. A. Walton Studio, Hudson, Florida

This is a Mississippian period town alongside a stream, complete with dugout canoes. Corn fields, grown with squash and other cultivated garden plants both familiar and unfamiliar to people today, would have been even more extensive than depicted - for example, more recent historical Shawnee towns were described as having fields that extended for miles. Imagine what kind of fields the more populous people in the Mississippian era would have had to maintain their way of life!

There would have been quite a few canoes, used both for transportation and carrying goods to and from trading centers, fields, or to procure materials like clay, chert and cane for artisans, and to use as fishing or hunting platforms. Lacking draft animals larger than dogs to pull loads overland, canoes and waterways were critically important to daily life.

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