Crossroads, p. 30
The Mississippians used stone axes and fire to clear fields, thus gradually diminishing the natural stands of nut trees in favor of corn fields, and they used stone hoes to till their crops.
More on Mississippian Woodworking Tools
(The Mississippians were primarily farmers, far more dependent on their fields of corn, beans, and squash than any other people previously. One of their main gardening tools was a hoe with a large chipped stone blade 8 to 10 inches long and 4 to5 inches wide. Notice the polish of this specimen, from the long use in sandy soil.)
In their villages they dug large storage pits where all of the corn and other grains grown by the community could be kept from season to season. Seed corn was stored in special clay jars fitted with stoppers. As corn became the staple in their diet, the Mississippians developed a powerful taste for salt, possibly because they were no longer eating enough meat to obtain the minimum amount of sodium (about one gram per day, or less) required to maintain good health. One must consume about 2.5 grams, or 1/3 teaspoon, of salt (sodium chloride) to get that amount of sodium. They obtained salt by evaporating water from the salt springs or "salines" that occur in parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Illinois. Tribes that were fortunate enough to have salt springs in their territories traded cakes of salt to those that did not. The Caddo people of southwest Arkansas owned all of the most productive salines in the state and they traded salt to many tribes in the Mississippi Valley.
Although American Indians now revere corn as a perfect food, the way Europeans revere milk and beef and Orientals revere ric, corn is inferior nutritionally to the older plant foods that it displaced, particularly nuts. Its great virtue is its astounding productivity. Compared to rice, wheat, and barley it is a super plant (it has been called "a wonder of bio-engineering efficiency") because the ratio of corn seeds harvested to corn seeds sown is 300 to 1. For rice and wheat it is between 10 to 1 and 30 to 1. Corn, the super plant, certainly supported the population explosion that occurred in the Mississippian era. Without corn it could never have occurred, and corn may have even triggered it.
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