In the long history of documenting the material culture of the archaeological record, meaning and actions of makers and users of these items is often overlooked. The authors in this book focus on rituals exploring the natural and made landscape stages, the ritual directors, including their progression from shaman to priesthood, and meaning of the rites. They also provide comments on the end or failure of rites and cults from Paleoindian into post-DeSoto years. Chapters examine the archaeological records of Cahokia, the lower Ohio Valley, Aztalan Wisconsin, Vermont, Florida, and Georgia, and others scan the Eastern US, investigating tobacco/datura, color symbolism, deer symbolism, mound stratigraphy, flintknapping, stone caching, cults and their organization, and red ochre. These authors collectively query the beliefs that can be gleaned from mortuary practices and their variation, from mound construction, from imagery, from the choice of landscape setting. While some rituals were short-lived, others can be shown to span millennia as the ritual specialists modified their interpretations and introduced innovations.

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Chapter 1. Cultic ritual complexes
• Part 1: Cults and rituals
  • Chapter 2. The old Fire-deer spirits cult in the Archaic period of eastern North America
  • Chapter 3. Priestesses and priests, temples, and goddesses: structuring and recentering ritual in early Cahokian religious landscapes
  • Chapter 4. Continuity, resilience, and transformation in Choctaw ritual practice
  • Chapter 5. Places of stone and skill: an exploration of Paleoindian and Early Archaic rituals and ritual practitioners in Northeastern North America
  • Chapter 6. Watchfires above the wetwoods: late Middle Archaic mortuary ritual and landscape in the Falls of the Ohio region
  • Chapter 7. Persons of the Directions: ontology and ethics meet cosmology in understanding the world views and rituals of Adena, Hopewell, and post-contact Eastern Woodland Indian societies
  • Chapter 8. Set, setting, and sacra: Eastern North America’s tobacco shamans and the New World narcotic complex
  • Chapter 9. Figured practices: the material heritage of ritual in the Great Lakes region
• Part 2: Landscape, shrines, and pilgrimage
  • Chapter 10. Portals through the spirit world: pre-contact ceremonial cave use in the American Southeast
  • Chapter 11. Rituals of stone: Native American use of stone in the Southeastern US
  • Chapter 12. Revisiting Aztalan: looking at ritual from several perspectives
  • Chapter 13. Sacred journeys in the greater Cahokia region
  • Chapter 14. Paths of the lightning arrow: the Apalachee ballgame and the persistence of landscapes
• Backcover