The Late Woodland period in eastern North America

Archaeologists date the Late Woodland period to about 500–1000. Populations do not seem to have declined, but they dispersed: settlements became more numerous and, with exceptions, smaller than in the Middle Woodland; the building of burial mounds fell off sharply in most areas, and so did the long-distance trade in exotic materials that had sustained Hopewell. Serious cultivation of plants increasingly supplemented gathering, although full-scale intensive farming began only in the following Mississippian period.

The bow and arrow gradually took the place of the spear and atlatl — though at the mouth of the Mississippi Hernando de Soto’s expedition still met people who preferred the spear around 1543. The reasons for these changes are unknown. Suggested explanations include population growth that trade could no longer support, and raiding for resources; the depletion of big game by bow hunters, which forced groups to split up; a colder climate, perhaps after the volcanic winter of 536; and farming techniques so widespread that exchange between groups lost its purpose.

As communities grew more isolated, distinctive regional cultures took shape, such as Baytown, Troyville and Coles Creek in Louisiana, Alachua and Weeden Island in Florida and Plum Bayou in Arkansas and Missouri. The end date of 1000 is conventional: many areas adopted the Mississippian way of life much later, and some peoples of the north and northeast, such as the Iroquois, kept a way of life technologically identical to the Late Woodland until the arrival of Europeans.