The mound-building tradition, the corn-based agriculture, the trade networks, the distinctive artistic styles of the Mississippian world — all of these continued to develop and diversify in the centuries after Cahokia.

The Native nations that European explorers and colonizers encountered in the Southeast and the Mississippi Valley when they arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the cultural heirs of this Mississippian tradition.

The communities described by Hernando de Soto’s expedition in the 1540s — the first European force to traverse much of the Southeast — were Mississippian communities, some of them still centered on mound complexes that were functioning ceremonial and political centers.

The descriptions in the de Soto expedition accounts provide a glimpse of what Mississippian urban life looked like in its later, post-Cahokia form — smaller in scale than Cahokia had been at its peak, but recognizably continuous with the tradition that Cahokia had exemplified.