Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms

Between AD 900-1600, the native people of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC). This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.

ISBN 0292713479   Pages 320 ISBN13 9780292713475 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher University of Texas Press   Weight (grammes) 572 Imprint University of Texas Press   Published in Austin, TX Format Hardback   Series title Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies (Hardcover) Publication date 13 Apr 2007   Height (mm) 233 Library of Congress 2006022618   Width (mm) 160 DEWEY 976.01   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

1		Introduction by F. Kent Reilly III and James F. Garber		1
2		Some cosmological motifs in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex by George E. Lankford		8
3		The petaloid motif : a celestial symbolic locative in the shell art of Spiro by F. Kent Reilly III		39
4		On the identity of the birdman within Mississippian period art and iconography by James Brown		56
5		The great serpent in eastern North America by George E. Lankford		107
6		Identification of a moth/butterfly supernatural in Mississippian art by Vernon James Knight and Judith A. Franke		136
7		Ritual, medicine, and the war trophy iconographic theme in the Mississippian Southeast by David H. Dye		152
8		The "path of souls" : some death imagery in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex by George E. Lankford		174
9		Sequencing the Braden style within Mississippian period art and iconography by James Brown		213
10		Osage texts and Cahokia data by Alice Beck Kehoe		246

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