Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos (American Landscapes) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785706284 ISBN 13: 9781785706288

Publisher: Oxbow Books, 2018

Synopsis

This beautifully illustrated volume examines American Indian rock art across an expansive region of eastern North America during the Mississippian Period (post AD 900). Unlike portable cultural material, rock art provides in situ evidence of ritual activity that links ideology and place. The focus is on the widespread use of cosmograms depicted in Mississippian rock art imagery. This approach anchors broad distributional patterns of motifs and themes within a powerful framework for cultural interpretation, yielding new insights on ancient concepts of landscape, ceremonialism, and religion. It also provides a unified, comprehensive perspective on Mississippian symbolism. A selection of landscape cosmograms from various parts of North America and Europe taken from the ethnographic records are examined and an overview of American Indian cosmographic landscapes provided to illustrate their centrality to indigenous religious traditions across North America. Authors discuss what a cosmogram-based approach can teach us about people, places, and past environments and what it may reveal that more conventional approaches overlook. Geographical variations across the landscape, regional similarities, and derived meaning found in these data are described. The authors also consider the difficult subject of how to develop a more detailed chronology for eastern rock art.

Table of Contents

List of Illustration -- Captions, Charts, Tables
Preface

1. Materiality and Cultural Landscapes in Native America: George Sabo and Jan Simek

Missouri: West Mississippi River Valley
2. The Big Five Petroglyph Sites: Their Place on the Landscape and Relation to Their Creators: James R. Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados

3. Landscape, Cosmology, and the Old Woman: A Strong Feminine Presence: James R. Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados

Arkansas: Ozark Escarpment West of the Mississippi River
4. Petroglyphs, Portals, and People: Along the Eastern Ozark Escarpment, Arkansas: George Sabo III, Jerry E. Hilliard, Jami J. Lockhart, and Leslie C. Walker

Illinois: East Mississippi River Valley
5. Transformed Spaces: A Landscape Approach to the Rock Art of Illinois: Mark J. Wagner, Kayeleigh Sharp, and Jonathan Remo

Appalachian Plateau
6. Prehistoric Rock Art, Social Boundaries, and Cultural Landscapes on the Cumberland Plateau of Southeast North America: Jan F. Simek, Alan Cressler, and B. Bart Henson

Appalachian Mountains
7. Betwixt And Between: The Occurrence of Petroglyphs Between Townhouses of The Living and Townhouses of Spirit Beings in Northern Georgia and Western North Carolina: Johannes Loubser, Scott Ashcraft, James Wettstaed

References
Index

About this title

About the Author

Carol Diaz-Granados is a professional archaeologist and Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St Louis, where she has lectured for 39 years. Her major research focus is American Indian rock art, symbolism, and iconography, and associated oral traditions. Carol has written, edited, or co-edited five books and has chapters in various edited volumes and two museum exhibition catalogues. Her 2004 volume, Rock-Art of Eastern North America won an Outstanding Academic Title award. Carol was senior editor of Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos (2018).

Jan Simek is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Knoxville. his research interests include North American rock art, Palaeolithic and cave archaeology, human evolution, quantitative and spatial analysis and Southeastern archaeology.

George Sabo is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas and Director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey. His research centers on human/environment relationships, expressive culture (art and ritual) among Southeastern Indians from pre-contact to modern times, American Indian interactions with European explorers and colonists in the Southeast, and the anthropology of history in modern Caddo, Osage and Quapaw communities in Oklahoma.

Mark Wagner is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Archaeogoical Invetigations, Department of Anthropology, Univeristy of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. His research interests include the prehistory and early history of both Native Americans and Europeans in Illinois and the lower Ohio River Valley, culture contact issues between Native Americans and Euro-Americans and Native American rock art sites, spirituality and religious beliefs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1785706284
• ISBN 13: 9781785706288
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Diaz-Granados Carol, Simek Jan, Sabo George, Wagner Mark