Mississippian centres after Cahokia: Moundville, Etowah and the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex

Moundville, on a bluff above the Black Warrior River in Alabama, was occupied from about 1000 to 1450. Around 1150 its leaders began to turn it from a local into a regional centre, and in the early 13th century the town was laid out anew: a great rectangular plaza was ringed by platform mounds — 29 survive, 32 by another count — and a bastioned wooden palisade about a mile long protected the town on three sides, the river guarding the fourth. The largest mounds stand on the north side; Mound B, a steep pyramid with two ramps, rises about 18 m. Archaeologists read the plan as a "sociogram" in which ranked clans occupied precincts of paired mounds whose size and position reflected their rank. At its height some 1,000–3,000 people lived within the walls and perhaps 10,000 more in the valley; after about 1300 Moundville became more a religious and political centre than a town, and by 1500 it was largely abandoned. It is the second-largest Mississippian site after Cahokia.

Etowah, on the Etowah River in north-western Georgia, was home to a succession of chiefdoms between about 1000 and 1550. The valley seems to have been empty around 1200–1250; the town was then rebuilt and reached its height in about 1325–1375. Its Temple Mound (Mound A) is about 19 m high. Burials of the elite in Mound C held copper tools, weapons and embossed copper plates, marble statues of a kneeling woman and a man, and fragments of brightly patterned cloth preserved by the copper. Among the plates are the Rogan plates, found in the 1880s, with falcon-dancer figures in the Classic Braden style of the Cahokia region; some such plates are thought to have been made at Cahokia itself. Trade and tribute brought whelk shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper, mica and flint from the Cumberland Plateau, and galena, graphite, greenstone and marble from the Piedmont.

The imagery shared by these centres was defined in 1945 by Antonio Waring and Preston Holder as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (it was also called the "Southern Cult"; some scholars now prefer "Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere"). Engraved on shell, embossed on copper or carved in stone, its motifs — the birdman or falcon dancer, the chunkey player, the forked eye, the cross in a circle, the hand and eye, maces and severed heads — depict a cosmos of three worlds: an Upper World of the Thunderers, the Sun, the Moon and the Morning Star, the Middle World of humans, and a Beneath World of the Underwater Panther, joined by an axis mundi in the form of a cedar tree or a striped pole. The style took shape at Cahokia as the Braden style and later diverged into regional styles — Hemphill at Moundville, Hightower at Etowah, Craig at Spiro in Oklahoma. The complex is thought to have peaked in about 1250–1350; afterwards, as long-distance exchange broke down, its motifs passed from exotic materials to ordinary pottery. Resemblances to Mesoamerican art were once explained by contact, but later research has found no direct link.