In Mississippian Culture Heroes, Ritual Regalia, and Sacred Bundles, archaeologists analyze evidence of the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Mississippian people through the lens of indigenous ontologies and material culture. Employing archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric evidence, the contributors explore the recent emphasis on iconography as an important component for interpreting eastern North America's ancient past. The research in this volume emphasizes the animistic nature of animals and objects, erasing the false divide between people and other-than-human beings. Drawing on an array of empirical approaches, the contributors demonstrate the importance of understanding beliefs and ritual and the significance of investigating how people in the past practiced religion and ritual by crafting, circulating, using, and ultimately decommissioning material items and spaces, including ceramic effigies, rock art, sacred bundles, shell gorgets, stone figurines, and symbolic weaponry.

Distilled from Arkansas: A Narrative History, the definitive work on the subject since its original publication in 2002, Arkansas: A Concise History is a succinct one-volume history of the state from the prehistory period to the near-present. Featuring four historians who have published extensively on a range of topics, the volume introduces readers to the major issues that have confronted the state and traces the evolution of those issues across time. The book begins by situating the state geographically and geologically and then moves on to chapters covering prehistory and precolonial periods. These chapters, written by George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, ground the reader in the important background of native peoples and their lifeways. Judge Morris S. Arnold's chapter on the colonial period portrays the colonial French and Spanish era and the interaction of those Europeans with Native Americans, particularly the Quapaw Indians. Civil War historian Tom DeBlack covers the territorial era, early statehood, antebellum, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne covers the period following Reconstruction including the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, World War I, the Elaine Race Massacre, the Great Depression, WorldWar II and its aftermath, the Civil Rights movement, bringing the book into the early twenty-first century. Linking these moments together and placing an emphasis on how economic decisions have informed Arkansas's history, Arkansas: A Concise History puts perspective on the political and economic realities the state continues to face today.