Long before Europeans visited Quanassee town, this valley was home to large communities of native farmers who grew corn, beans, pumpkins, sunflowers, and tobacco in the rich riverbottoms along the Hiwassee. The Spikebuck mound and village served as the ritual, civic, and political center for one such community that spread for miles along the river near Hayesville. Constructed more than 700 years ago as a platform for a temple/council house, the mound marks the spread of the Mississippian cultural pattern into the heart of the southern mountains. This pattern, shared by many societies across much of the southeastern United States, saw the rise of settled villages and towns supported by large-scale maize agriculture, the building of platform mounds for special ritual and political precincts, and broad themes and styles of sacred art that suggest similar belief systems among diverse peoples. In many areas of the Southeast, it was linked to the rise of complex social and political systems, including hereditary chiefdoms. The Spikebuck mound and village was one of a number of ritual and political centers in the upper Hiwassee River basin, alongside nearby centers at Hiwassee, Nottely, and probably Konahete. These mound centers probably represented distinct, politically independent towns, similar to autonomous Cherokee towns of the historic era. These southern Appalachian Mississippian mound towns were likely the direct ancestral antecedents of the Cherokee Valley Towns that Europeans encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and early written accounts of Cherokee villages probably depict lifeways very similar to those of earlier Mississippian societies in the mountains.