For two or three centuries, Spiro and its satellite centers flourished. Around A.D. 1250, they began to change their way of life. Frontier settlements were abandoned, some people completely left northeast Oklahoma, and others began congregating along the Grand and Arkansas Rivers. From A.D. 1200 to 1400, a large community developed on the uplands and terraces around the Spiro site; however few, if any, people were actually living at the site itself. Apparently, they only visited the mounds periodically for certain rituals and ceremonies. Mound construction continued, and many people were buried in Craig Mound. Their diverse graves and burial associations attest to the presence of a highly developed hierarchy of political-religious leaders. Of the more than 700 burials discovered at Craig Mound, most are believed to have been deposited during this time. Many of these burials may represent the remains of leaders from other communities who were brought to Spiro for burial. Because so few “status goods” are known from other northeast Oklahoma centers, either the distribution of wealth among leaders was very unequal or it was being deposited at Spiro along with its deceased owners who had been the leaders of other centers. By A.D. 1450, the dominant priestly chiefs were no longer evident in Spiro society; trade and influence among Southeastern chiefdoms were no more; and ritual mound construction at the Spiro site had apparently ceased. By the mid-sixteenth century, Spiro’s descendants were living in hamlets scattered along the Arkansas River between Muskogee and Spiro. Their settlements consisted of small, less substantial houses with many nearby storage and trash pits. For the first time in their history, these people were hunting bison extensively. The use of buffalo and increased use of storage pits indicates that Spiro’s descendants were becoming part-time hunters and farmers. After storing fall harvests, they left their homes to hunt bison in the upper reaches of the Grand and Verdigris Rivers. Travel was by canoe, with meat, hides and bones being carried back to villages in early winter. Another noteworthy feature of these later people’s cultural change was their adoption of ideas and tools which had long been common with the Plains Indians. As trade with the Southeastern chiefdoms decreased, that with the Plains people increased.