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.

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Materiality and cultural landscapes in Native America: George Sabo III and Jan F. Simek
  • Cultural landscapes as frameworks for rock art study
  • Further thoughts on landscape archaeology in North America
  • Examples of cultural landscapes in North America
  • The Mississippian cosmos
  • Summary and conclusions
• Missouri: West Mississippi River Valley
  • Chapter 2. The Big Five petroglyph sites: their place on the landscape and relation to their creators: James R. Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados
    • Quantifying the motifs
    • Cosmology
    • Some interesting implications
    • Polysemous symbolism and metaphors
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3. Landscape, cosmology, and the Old Woman: a strong feminine presence: James R. Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados
    • The landscape and the Old Woman
    • The Old Woman and the Landscape
    • The Wallen Creek site, Picture Cave, and the Old Woman
    • Conclusion
• Arkansas: Ozark Escarpment west of the Mississippi River
  • Chapter 4. Petroglyphs, portals, and people along the Eastern Ozark Escarpment, Arkansas: George Sabo III, Jerry E. Hilliard, Jami J. Lockhart, and Leslie C. Walker
    • History of rock art investigations in Arkansas
    • Preliminary findings of the Arkansas Rock Art Project
    • The Eastern Ozark Escarpment
    • Petroglyphs, portals, and people
• Illinois: East Mississippi River Valley
  • Chapter 5. Transformed spaces: a landscape approach to the rock art of Illinois: Mark J. Wagner, Kayeleigh Sharp, and Jonathan Remo
    • Spatial analysis methods
    • The Illinois landscape
    • The Millstone Bluff landscape
    • Jackson Bottoms Landscape
    • Conclusion
• Appalachian Plateau
  • Chapter 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
    • The Cumberland Plateau and surrounding regions
    • Kentucky
    • Alabama
    • Tennessee
    • Comparisons of rock art along the Cumberland Plateau
    • Conclusion
• Appalachian Mountains
  • Chapter 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
    • Environment, inferred similarities, relative sequence of application, and age range of petroglyphs
    • Indigenous beliefs, practices, and experiences regarding rock surfaces and water
    • The significance of petroglyph locations and motifs in indigenous context
    • Spirit beings, townhouses, and ancient mounds
    • Associated markings on the rocks
    • Concluding overview
• Appendix: rock art sites to visit in the Eastern United States
• Bibliography