The "lazy days of summer" offered household members many opportunities to acquire aquatic resources of all types (e.g., fish, aquatic turtles, freshwater mussels, waterfowl, wading birds). Harvesting fish from lakes and sloughs was probably easier during the summer as waters receded trapping large quantities of fish in small shallow pools. The quantity of fish caught in these small pools should not be underestimated. Historic Euroamerican accounts relate the gathering of fish in the American Bottom by the basketload.

Bowfin.

Fish bones and scales from an archaeological flotation sample.

By mid-summer, when other wild or domesticated plants had yet to produce edible parts, green maize could be harvested. Harvesting large quantities of green maize was an enormous asset to the Mississippian diet. It provided a needed food in large quantities to sustain households until other plants ripened in the fall. Some scholars (Milner and Wiant 1998) have suggested that summer was the time of civic work projects (mound building and maintenance, palisade construction, etc.), pointing out that the chief might use green maize to feed the laborers. The importance Mississippians placed on this mid-summer green maize harvest may be reflected in the green corn ceremonies of modern Native Americans in eastern North America.