The Anasazi became a tribe in the southwest of the USA, long before the white man came and ran them out. Most archeological discoveries were found in the four corners of the United States; Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. The main center of operations for the Anasazi people was in the Chaco Canyon where many masonry villages still exist, known as the Casas Grande’s with several sacred meeting places. These meeting places are where the people gathered to celebrate their rites. Their culture arose from an even more ancient people in the southwest. During their long history, the Anasazi evolved from a nomadic to a sedentary culture and existence.
At first hunter-gatherers, in time the Anasazi began raising maize and other crops. They also produced skillfully woven baskets. They were making their houses out of clay, mud, and things they found from the earth. The Anasazi were building pueblos, or villages, along with extraordinary pottery marked by elaborate black-on-white designs. Their villages, built at the top of mesas or in hollowed-out natural caves at the base of canyons, included multiple-room dwellings and complex apartment structures of stone or adobe masonry. No one knows what type of language the Anasazi spoke. Modern Pueblo groups share certain social patterns. Traditionally they are all matrilineal, meaning that clan affiliation is reckoned through the female line, and children "belong" to the mother's clan. They are Matrilocal, meaning that husbands traditionally move into the bride's family household. Their society is matriarchal, meaning that homes and farm land are owned by and inherited from the mother, and a wife has the right to divorce and evict her husband. However, some kinds of civil and religious authority are usually reserved for men. Among the Hopi, for instance, the village chief or Kikmongwi sometimes has been a woman, but usually the Kikmongwi is a man. Agriculture was the mainstay in economy, and for general goods.
The Anasazi still exist today. They still live mainly in the southwestern region of the United states, and practice many of their old traditions, such as; making stuff out of mud, and hunting wild animals.
Mound Builders were ancient people that liked to build mounds out of mound building material. They were prehistoric inhabitants that built these mounds for religious purposes, beliefs, burials, and ceremonies. Their culture mainly developed throughout what is now the present day Midwest, such as the Great Lakes, Ohio River Valley, and parts of Mississippi. At one time the term, “mound builder” was applied to the fictional race that was thought to have built these earthworks. Generally, these earthworks were flat topped pyramids, built for complex villages that arose from more dense populations with a specialized skill and knowledge. Benjamin Smith Barton proposed the theory that the mound builders were Vikings who came to North America and eventually disappeared, but Vikings were barbaric and liked to kill things, so this definitely means that they did not build them. The Middle Woodland period was the first era of widespread mound construction in Mississippi. Middle Woodland peoples were primarily hunters and gatherers who occupied semi-permanent or permanent settlements. Some mounds of this period were built to bury important members of local tribal groups. These burial mounds were rounded, dome-shaped structures that generally range from about three to 18 feet high, with diameters from 50 to 100 feet. Distinctive artifacts obtained through long-distance trade were sometimes placed with those buried in the mounds. The construction of burial mounds declined after the Middle Woodland, and only a few were built during the Late Woodland period. Woodland burial mounds can be visited at the Boyd, Bynum, and Pharr sites and at Chewalla Lake in Holy Springs National Forest.
It is said that these mounds were built by Indigenous people. Over the course of thousands of years, American indigenous peoples domesticated, bred and cultivated a large array of plant species. These species now constitute 50–60% of all crops in cultivation worldwide. In certain cases, the indigenous peoples developed entirely new species and strains through artificial selection, as was the case in the domestication and breeding of maize from wild grasses in the valleys of southern Mexico.
Mound Builders built mounds out of dirt, because they felt like it needed to go there. They lived in houses made of stuff, and tepees, because they were Indigenous.
