Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas
Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas

Author: J. Grant Stauffer

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2022-09-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1789258464

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This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.

Extracting Stone
Extracting Stone

Author: Anne S. Dowd

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 178570625X

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A comprehensive view of quarrying activities from three key regions in North America. This exciting new addition to the the American Landscapes series provides an in-depth account of how flintknappers obtained and used stone based on archaeological, geological, landscape, and anthropological data. Featuring case studies from three key regions in North America, this book gives readers a comprehensive view of quarrying activities ranging from extracting the raw material to creating finished stone tools. Quarry landscapes were some of the first large-scale land modification efforts among early peoples in the New World. The chronological time periods covered by quarrying activities, show that most intensive use took place during parts of the Archaic and Woodland periods or between roughly 4000–1000 years ago when denser populations existed, but use began as early as the Paleoindian Period, about 13,000–9000 years ago, and ended in the Historic or Protohistoric periods, when colonists and Native Americans mined chert for gunflints and sharpening stones or abrasives. From the procurement systems approach common in the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists can now employ a landscape approach to quarry studies in tandem with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) computer mapping and digital analysis, Light and RADAR (LiDAR) airborne laser scanning for recording topography, or high resolution satellite imagery. Authors Dowd and Trubitt show how sites functioned in a broad landscape context, which site locations or raw material types were preferred and why, what cultures were responsible for innovative or intensive quarry resource extraction, as well as how land use changed over time. Besides discussions of the way that industrialists used natural resources to change their technology by means of manufacture, trade, and exchange, examples are given of heritage sites that people can visit in the United States and Canada.

Explanations in Iconography
Explanations in Iconography

Author: Carol Diaz-Granados

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

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Case studies combine archaeological data and oral tradition to illustrate how the archaeological expression of beliefs and meanings passed down in the oral tradition may be interpreted. Explanations in Iconography: Ancient American Indian Art, Symbol, and Meaning is a significant contribution to the field of archaeology – a contribution in iconography studies that has gradually been coming into its own. Iconography is a rich and fascinating field, as applied to the complex, and heretofore enigmatic, imagery on many ancient Pre-Columbian artifacts. When viewed through the lens of early ethnographic records and American Indian oral traditions, as well as information from knowledgeable American Indian elders, it opens a world of understanding and clarity until recently unknown in the field of anthropological archaeology. It brings us closer to the people who created the artifacts and offers a glimpse into the symbols and beliefs that were important to them. Chapters cover a wide variety of artifacts and imagery from several ancient American Indian cultures. These artifacts include petroglyphs and pictographs (rock art), mounds, engraved shell cups and gorgets, burial architecture and grave furniture, pottery, copper repoussé, and other media. Ancient graphics, engravings, mounds, and all were created to deliver a message to the viewer – and many of those messages are finally coming to light. The artifacts included are from a variety of regions, mainly in the Midwest and Eastern United States. We hope that this volume will encourage others to look more deeply into the meaning behind the ancient imagery and arts and give the past a chance to be known.

Transforming the Landscape
Transforming the Landscape

Author: Carol Diaz-Granados

Publisher: American Landscapes

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781785706288

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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.

Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms
Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms

Author: F. Kent Reilly

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0292774400

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Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples 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.

The Teotihuacan Trinity
The Teotihuacan Trinity

Author: Annabeth Headrick

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0292749872

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Northeast of modern-day Mexico City stand the remnants of one of the world's largest preindustrial cities, Teotihuacan. Monumental in scale, Teotihuacan is organized along a three-mile-long thoroughfare, the Avenue of the Dead, that leads up to the massive Pyramid of the Moon. Lining the avenue are numerous plazas and temples, which indicate that the city once housed a large population that engaged in complex rituals and ceremonies. Although scholars have studied Teotihuacan for over a century, the precise nature of its religious and political life has remained unclear, in part because no one has yet deciphered the glyphs that may explain much about the city's organization and belief systems. In this groundbreaking book, Annabeth Headrick analyzes Teotihuacan's art and architecture, in the light of archaeological data and Mesoamerican ethnography, to propose a new model for the city's social and political organization. Challenging the view that Teotihuacan was a peaceful city in which disparate groups united in an ideology of solidarity, Headrick instead identifies three social groups that competed for political power—rulers, kin-based groups led by influential lineage heads, and military orders that each had their own animal insignia. Her findings provide the most complete evidence to date that Teotihuacan had powerful rulers who allied with the military to maintain their authority in the face of challenges by the lineage heads. Headrick's analysis also underscores the importance of warfare in Teotihuacan society and clarifies significant aspects of its ritual life, including shamanism and an annual tree-raising ceremony that commemorated the Mesoamerican creation story.

Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare
Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare

Author: M. Kathryn Brown

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780759102835

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Collection of articles providing new research on warfare in ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican societies based on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic evidence

The Petroglyphs and Pictographs of Missouri
The Petroglyphs and Pictographs of Missouri

Author: Carol Diaz-Granados

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2000-03-21

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0817309888

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This comprehensive guide to the rock art of Missouri presents major design motifs and links those images to Native American beliefs.

The Rock-Art of Eastern North America
The Rock-Art of Eastern North America

Author: Carol Diaz-Granados

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2004-11-28

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 0817350969

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Showcases the wealth of new research on sacred imagery found in twelve states and four 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.