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The Indians' Old World - Coggle Diagram
The Indians' Old World
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Indigenous North Americans exhibited a remarkable range of languages, economies, political systems, beliefs, and material culture.
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Goods fashioned from materials were buried with human beings, indicating both their religious significance and, by their uneven distribution, their role as markers of social or political rank.
They deposited massive quantities of goods with the dead in large mounds and exported more to communities scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley
By the twelfth century, agricultural production had spread over much of the Eastern Woodlands as well as to more of the Southwest.
In both regions, even more complex societies were emerging to dominate widespread exchange networks.
"Mississippian" societies consisting of
fortified political and ceremonial centers and outlying villages. 
The largest, most complex Mississippian center was Cahokia.
By the twelfth century, Cahokia probably numbered 20,000 people and contained over 120 mounds within a five-square-mile area.
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At the outset of the twelfth century, the center of production and exchange in the Southwest was in the basin of the San Juan River at Chaco Canvon in New Mexico.
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From the mid-twelfth century through the fourteenth, the demographic map of the Southwest was also transformed as Chaco Canyon and other Anasazi and Hohokam centers were abandoned.
Southwesterners had made a practice of shifting their settlements when facing shortages of water and arable land and other consequences of climatic or demographic change.
Archeologists point to signs that the centralized systems lost their ability to mobilize labor, redistribute goods, and coordinate religious ceremonies.
Most Anasazi peoples dispersed in small groups, joining others to form new communities in locations with sufficient rainfall.
Given the archaeological record, North American "prehistory" can hardly be characterized as a multiplicity of discrete microhistories.
The earliest Paleo-Indian bands were exchanges that linked peoples across geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.
The effects of these links are apparent in the spread of raw materials and finished goods, of beliefs and ceremonies, and of techniques for food production and for manufacturing
By the twelfth century, some exchange networks had become highly formalized and centralized.
Societies progressed from small, egalitarian, autonomous communities
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Larger, more hierarchical, and centralized political aggregations with more complex economies.
Bottoms and the San Juan River basin, where twelfth-century populations were:
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