The Archaic tradition
The Archaic tradition economic foundations based on hunting, fishing, shell fishing, and plant collecting. It is the first major pattern to distinguish the Eastern Woodlands as a culture area and had a profound formative influence on the later traditions of the area, both in elements of technology and ceremonialism. The archaic tradition was characterized by large and broad-bladed dart points and ground and polished stone tools and ornament.
The Woodland tradition
The Woodland tradition appeared in the east around 1000 B.C. Although its root is in the Archaic, it displayed new elements. Woodland pottery, ceramics figurine, mountary mounds and earthworks, and plant cultivation. The most intensive expressions of the tradition were in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and from these two drainages it appears to have fanned outward, replacing or modifying the cultures of the Archaic tradition.
The Mississippian tradition
The Mississippian tradition, appeared somewhere in the lower and central Mississippi valley regions. There are significant innovation: the intensification of maize agriculture, the development of large permanent villages and town, the construction of platform mounds to serve as base for temples or palace-type building, and the arrangement of these mounds around rectangular open plazas. Mesoamerican strains in all these developments are obvious, and new pottery vessel forms and decorative techniques also suggest links with that area. Mississippian culture spread in all directions from its early river centers, so that by A.D 1400 its influence were found throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands area.
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