Evolution of a Native American Society: A Journey Through Ancient History

As a Native American culture, the Chickasaw people broadly trace their ancestry back to the migratory peoples of the Paleo-Indian period, which spanned from roughly 10,000 BC - 8500 BC. Legend has it that the Chickasaws migrated for generations from “the place in the West” to settle in what is now the Southeast. The climate was drier and colder than today in the centuries after humans first migrated to the Americas and glaciers covered the northern lands. Paleo-Indian era people roamed the country in small extended family bands and hunted herds of mammoth, mastodon, giant bison, horse, ground sloth and other Pleistocene megafauna. The people of this era used Clovis point spears to hunt, which have been discovered all over North America, as well as in what is now Mississippi. Clovis points were often made of exotic high-quality flint, or chert, and sometimes traced to modern day northern Alabama and middle Tennessee, the Chickasaw’s historic homeland. By the Archaic Era, 8000 BC -1000 BC, glaciers melted as temperatures rose and fluctuated. As the climate changed, some of the large animals that the ancient Americans of this era depended on disappeared. Eventually temperatures became more stable, which allowed Native peoples to settle into their environments. The Mississippi River also made its transition from a glacial outwash stream of converging and diverging waterways to a broad, meandering river and rich floodplain. For the ancestors of the Chickasaws, rivers would become highways for them to trade goods aboard dugout canoes. 


Plant foods and smaller animals, such as whitetail deer, became the major source of sustenance as people adapted. With the invention of ground stone tools, the ancient people of North America began to process nuts or seeds such as hickory nuts, acorns, sunflower and chenopodium. Ground and polished stone axes were also developed for deadening trees and working wood. Sharp points were chipped from high-quality chert and then affixed to throwing spears, which were launched with the aid of the atlatl or spear-throwing stick. The end of this long cultural stage was marked by growing populations and the establishment of territories, with mobile bands of people congregating seasonally along rivers at shellfish sites. The ancient Native American people began to establish semi-permanent clan villages during the Woodland Era (1000 BC - 900 CE) and relied to a larger extent on nuts and seeds boiled in cordmarked clay pottery vessels. Rich wetland plant, animal, fish, and shellfish sustained the ancestors of today’s southeastern and Mississippi Valley tribes. Hunting and gathering also continued with increasingly larger populations along the river valleys.  During the Middle Woodland period, long-distance trade peaked with the movement of exotic chert blades, native copper, galena, quartz crystal, marine shell, decorated pottery and other valued items. Ceramic technology and the construction of earthen mounds for communal ceremonies and funerary rites also became a universal trait of Woodland societies. 

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