Although the Mississippian culture was heavily disrupted before a complete understanding of the political landscape was written down, many Mississippian political aspects were documented and others have been discovered by research. Some of the major sites are listed below, for a more comprehensive list see List of Mississippian sites.
• Angel Mounds: A chiefdom in southern Indiana near Evansville. It’s thought by some archaeologists that the Late Mississippian Caborn-Welborn culture developed from the Angel Phase people around 1400 AD and lasted to around 1700 AD.
• Cahokia: Near East St. Louis, Illinois, Cahokia was possibly the first, and certainly the largest and most influential of the Mississippian culture centres.
• Emerald Mound: A Plaquemine Mississippian period archaeological site located on the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton, Mississippi. The site dates from the period between 1200 and 1730 AD. The platform mound is the second-largest Pre-Columbian earthwork in the country, after Monks Mound at Cahokia.
• Etowah: One of the major Mississippian chiefdoms, located in Georgia, believed by some to be a longstanding antagonist of the Moundville polity.
• Grand Village of the Natchez: The main village of the Natchez people, with three mounds. The only mound site to be used and maintained into historic times.
• Kincaid Site: A major Mississippian mound centre in southern Illinois across the Ohio River from Paducah, Kentucky.
• Moundville: Ranked with Cahokia as one of the two most important sites at the core of the Mississippian culture, located near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
• Ocmulgee: Originally a Mississippian chiefdom, the site was later used by the Creek Indians into historic times.
• The Parkin Site: The type site for the “Parkin phase”, an expression of Late Mississippian culture, believed by many archaeologists to be the province of Casqui visited by Hernando de Soto in 1542.
• Spiro Mounds: One of the best-studied archaeological centres of Caddoan Mississippian culture, located in eastern Oklahoma.