What is Reddit's opinion of Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World (A School for Advanced Research Popular Archaeology Book)?

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Ah ok, I was just trying to figure out the culture you were referring to. I'm not aware of any plains city building going back to 1000 BC. However, the Old Culture Complex did have rather substantial relations with a city in Louisiana, called Poverty Point. Poverty Point is a very ancient city, and was the first to bring together a substantial trading economy funneling goods to the capital.

Copperworking near the Great Lakes definitely didn't stop at 1000BC. The history of the region actually has one of the most interesting stories in history, I'd argue it constitutes as world history with the amount of action happening there. I'll try to give you an abridged version from what the archaeology and native wisdoms tell us.

After 1000BC, copper was no longer used by just the people living near the Great Lakes. The first civilization to do this was the afore mentioned Poverty Point. Instead of working and using the copper just near the lakes, the raw material was shipped out to be worked by civilizations all over the continent, and copper from the region became sacred and important in leadership/kingship all over. Other civilizations would also important tons of copper, such as the Adena and Hopewell.

As you can imagine, ensuring the accessibility to copper of the Great Lakes became important to city building groups, and things hadn't changed by Cahokia's rise in 1000 AD. It did the same, and Mississippian copperworking is incredible. Take a look at just a few of their pieces. However Cahokia seemed to be sort of expansionistic about it, establishing settlements in the region. War seemed to follow, and towns in this northern region were burned. In response, Cahokia seems to have built fortresses like Aztalan, some of the most sophisticated fortifications in the Americas. 4-5 rows of palisade walls with bastions at intervals forced attackers into a narrow passage before reaching the heart of the settlement. This is in Wisconsin, at a river leading from the Great Lakes to Cahokia. A crazy time. It's talked about in this book.

And the copper continued to be important to many historic groups, Plains groups included

Timothy R. Pauketat's books are a good start, especially <em>Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World</em>.

There's also <em>Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun</em> by Charles M. Hudson for annotated primary sources of the de Soto expedition into the Southeast, and <em>Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone</em> by Robbie Ethridge and <em>Epidemics and Enslavement</em> by Paul Kelton for what happened a little while after that.

I have a suggestion for you then: read (normally archaeological) works about the civilizations that lived before, not the interactions with Europeans. This stuff is way, way more interesting that you would think, especially since the cultural differences are sometimes enormous. Reading some anthropology papers are also more interesting, and I'll put some links there, too; usually western history books gloss over these societies and make them out to be really insignificant, and that can't be further from the truth. Some non-historical texts can be just an important to lend an understanding of a very different culture (Wisdom Sits in Places and God is Red are really good examples of this; place and time are thought of very differently in many indigenous American societies, which puts a lot into perspective).

Here's a good reading list for you:

Medeival Mississippians

An Iroquoian case study by Bruce Trigger about Iroquoian culture using historical texts, which was really interesting. They had a totally gift-based economy, worth reading this; in this link it seems to be readable for free from Google books

In search of Chaco

Everything you know about Indians is wrong

Wisdom Sits in Places

God is Red