Woodland period in the context of "Mississippian culture"

Cord-marked pottery or Cordmarked pottery is an early form of a simple earthenware pottery. It allowed food to be stored and cooked over fire. Cord-marked pottery varied slightly around the world, depending upon the clay and raw materials that were available. It generally coincided with cultures moving to an agrarian and more settled lifestyle, like that of the Woodland period, as compared to a strictly hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Minnesota (/ˌmɪnəˈsoʊtə/ MIN-ə-SOH-tə) is a state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the south, and North Dakota and South Dakota to the west. The northeast corner has a water boundary with Michigan. It is the 12th-largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd-most populous, with about 5.8 million residents. Minnesota is known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes"; it has 14,420 bodies of fresh water covering at least ten acres each. Roughly a third of the state is forested. Much of the remainder is prairie and farmland. More than 60% of Minnesotans (about 3.71 million) live in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, known as the "Twin Cities", which is Minnesota's main political, economic, and cultural hub and the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. Other minor metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas include Duluth, Mankato, Moorhead, Rochester, and St. Cloud.

Minnesota, which derives its name from the Dakota language, has been inhabited by various Native Americans since the Woodland period of the 11th century BCE. Between roughly 200 and 500 CE, two areas of the indigenous Hopewell tradition emerged: the Laurel complex in the north, and Trempealeau Hopewell in the Mississippi River Valley in the south. The Upper Mississippian culture, consisting of the Oneota people and other Siouan speakers, emerged around 1000 CE and lasted through the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century. French explorers and missionaries were the earliest Europeans to enter the region, encountering the Dakota, Ojibwe, and various Anishinaabe tribes. Much of what is now Minnesota formed part of the vast French holding of Louisiana, which the United States purchased in 1803. After several territorial reorganizations, the Minnesota Territory was admitted to the Union as the 32nd state in 1858. Minnesota's official motto, L'Étoile du Nord ("The Star of the North"), is the only state motto in French. This phrase was adopted shortly after statehood and reflects both the state's early French explorers and its position as the northernmost state in the contiguous U.S.

Many pre-Columbian cultures in North America were collectively termed "Mound Builders", but the term has no formal meaning. It does not refer to specific people or archaeological culture but refers to the characteristic mound earthworks that indigenous peoples erected for an extended period of more than 5,000 years. The "Mound Builder" cultures span the period of roughly 3500 BCE (the construction of Watson Brake) to the 16th century CE, including the Archaic period (Horr's Island), Woodland period (Caloosahatchee, Adena and Hopewell cultures), and Mississippian period. Geographically, the cultures were present in the region of the Great Lakes, the Ohio River Valley, Florida, and the Mississippi River Valley and its tributary waters. Outlying mounds exist in South Carolina at Santee and in North Carolina at Town Creek.

The first mound building was an early marker of political and social complexity among the cultures in the eastern part of what is now the United States. Watson Brake in Louisiana, constructed about 3500 BCE during the Middle Archaic period, is the oldest known and dated mound complex in North America. It is one of 11 mound complexes from this period found in the Lower Mississippi Valley.These cultures generally had developed hierarchical societies that had an elite. These commanded hundreds or even thousands of workers to dig up tons of earth with the hand tools available, move the soil long distances, and finally, workers to create the shape with layers of soil as directed by the builders. However early mounds found in Louisiana preceded such cultures and were products of hunter-gatherer cultures.

The Adena culture was a pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from 500 BC to 100 AD, in a time known as the Early Woodland period. The Adena culture refers to what were probably a number of related Native American societies sharing a burial complex and ceremonial system. The Adena culture was centered on the location of the modern state of Ohio, but also extended into contiguous areas of Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Southern Wisconsin and parts of extreme western Pennsylvania.

Effigy Mounds National Monument preserves more than 200 prehistoric mounds built by pre-ColumbianMound Builder cultures, mostly in the first millennium CE, during the later part of the Woodland period of pre-Columbian North America.Numerous effigy mounds are shaped like animals, including bears and birds.

The monument is located primarily in Allamakee County, Iowa, with a small part in Clayton County, Iowa, in the midwestern United States. The park's visitor center is located in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, just north of Marquette.In 2017, the Effigy Mounds were featured in the America the Beautiful Quarters Program.