• The Ancestral Pueblo and Mound Builders were similar in a number of ways.
• Their settlements were linked into trading networks, and they also participated in long-distance exchange.
• Both groups created structures to track the heavens.
• Both ultimately adopted maize from Mesoamerica.
• They also differed in a number of ways.
• The Mound Builders participated in an independent Agricultural Revolution and continued to supplement their diets by gathering and hunting until maize arrived from Mesoamerica after 800 C.E. The Ancestral Pueblo peoples acquired maize from Mesoamerica much earlier and settled into a more fulltime agricultural culture earlier in their development.
• The Mound Builders created larger monumental architecture both in their burial mounds and in their geometrical earthworks than did Ancestral Pueblo peoples, although the Ancestral Pueblo people did create kivas as ceremonial centers and networks of roads that may have had religious significance.
• The largest mound-building settlements, like Cahokia, were far larger urban centers than those of the Ancestral Pueblo.
• In comparison to the mound-building cultures, the Ancestral Pueblo society started later and did not last as long.
