The traumatic impact of European contact — the epidemic diseases that killed much of the Native population of the Americas in the generations after contact, the disruption of trade networks, the violence of colonization — transformed the Mississippian world in ways that were catastrophic.

Many communities that had been flourishing at the time of first European contact were gone by the time more systematic European settlement began, devastated by diseases that moved faster than the Europeans themselves.

The nations that survived — the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Quapaw, and others — carried the Mississippian cultural heritage through this catastrophe and continue to maintain it.

The mounds that survive in the Southeast, including some that were still being used in the colonial period, connect the present to the world that Cahokia represented.

The continuity is real, even if it has been disrupted and transformed by centuries of historical trauma.