A brief history of Indiana
The source of Indiana’s name does not require much research to discover. Indiana’s very first inhabitants were Paleo-Indians who migrated to the region between 8000 and 6000 BCE. Then, roughly 1,100 years ago in 900 CE, Native Americans known as Mississippians migrated to Indiana and so came Indiana’s first technologically advanced civilization. The Mississippians constructed vast cities. They practiced mound-building, first for burial purposes and then for homes. Their mounds remain to this day and can be seen in numbers at Indiana’s Mounds State Park.
The entire Mississippian society disappeared from Indiana around 1450 CE. Within 150 years, there were two major Indian nations living in the Eastern Woodlands region (the area east of the Mississippi River), the Iroquois and Algonquin. Within each of these nations, there were multiple sub-nations, called tribes, who possessed common traditions and a shared history and language.
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