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.

This extensively illustrated volume provides the first complete visual documentation and a pioneering iconographic analysis of Picture Cave, an eastern Missouri cavern filled with Native American pictographs that is one of the most important prehistoric sites in North America. A millennia ago, Native Americans entered the dark recesses of a cave in eastern Missouri and painted an astonishing array of human, animal, and supernatural creatures on its walls. Known as Picture Cave, it was a hallowed site for sacred rituals and rites of passage, for explaining the multi-layered cosmos, for vision quests, for communing with spirits in the "other world," and for burying the dead. The number, variety, and complexity of images make Picture Cave one of the most significant prehistoric sites in North America, similar in importance to Cahokia and Chaco Canyon. Indeed, scholars will be able to use it to reconstruct much of the Native American symbolism of the early Western Mississippian world. The Picture Cave Interdisciplinary Project brought together specialists in American Indian art and iconography, two artists, Osage Indian elders, a museum curator, a folklorist, and an internationally renowned cave archaeologist to produce the first complete documentation of the pictographs on the cave walls and the first interpretations of their meanings and significance. This extensively illustrated volume presents the Project's findings, including an introduction to Picture Cave and prehistoric cave art and technical analyses of pigments, radiocarbon dating, spatial order, and archaeological remains. Interpretations of the cave's imagery, from individual motifs to complex panels; the responses of contemporary artists; and interviews with Osage elders (descendants of the people who made the art), describing what Picture Cave means to them today, are also included. A visual glossary of all the images in Picture Cave as well as panoramic views complete this pathfinding volume.

Showcases the wealth of new research on sacred imagery found in 12 states and 4 Canadian provinces.

In archaeology, rock-art--any long-lasting marking made on a natural surface--is similar to material culture (pottery and tools) because it provides a record of human activity and ideology at that site. Petroglyphs, pictographs, and dendroglyphs (tree carvings) have been discovered and recorded throughout the eastern woodlands of North America on boulders, bluffs, and trees, in caves and in rock shelters. These cultural remnants scattered on the landscape can tell us much about the belief systems of the inhabitants that left them behind.

"The Rock-Art of Eastern North America" brings together 20 papers from recent research at sites in eastern North America, where humidity and the actions of weather, including acid rain, can be very damaging over time. Contributors to this volume range from professional archaeologists and art historians to avocational archaeologists, including a surgeon, a lawyer, two photographers, and an aerospace engineer. They present information, drawings, and photographs of sites ranging from the Seven Sacred Stones in Iowa to the Bald Friar Petroglyphs of Maryland and from the Lincoln Rise Site in Tennessee to the Nisula Site in Quebec.

Discussions of the significance of artist gender, the relationship of rock-art to mortuary caves, and the suggestive link to the peopling of the continent are particularly notable contributions. Discussions include the history, ethnography, recording methods, dating, and analysis of the subject sites and integrate these with the known archaeological data.