Sun Circles and Human Hands
Sun Circles and Human Hands

Author: Emma Lila Fundaburk

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2001-02-22

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0817310770

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From utilitarian arrowheads to beautiful stone effigy pipes to ornately-carved shell disks, the photographs and drawings in Sun Circles and Human Hands present the archaeological record of the art and native crafts of the prehistoric southeastern Indians, painstakingly compiled in the 1950s by two sisters who traveled the eastern United States interviewing archaeologists and collectors and visiting the major repositories. Although research over the last 50 years has disproven many of the early theories reported in the text—which were not the editors' theories but those of the archaeologists of the day—the excellent illustrations of objects no longer available for examination have more than validated the lasting worth of this popular book.

Spirits of the Air
Spirits of the Air

Author: Shepard Krech

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0820328154

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Before the massive environmental change wrought by the European colonization of the South, hundreds of species of birds filled the region's flyways in immeasurable numbers. Before disease, war, and displacement altered the South's earliest human landscape, Native Americans hunted and ate birds and made tools and weapons from their beaks, bones, and talons. More significant to Shepard Krech III, Indians adorned themselves with feathers, invoked avian powers in ceremonies and dances, and incorporated bird imagery on pottery, carvings, and jewelry. Krech, a renowned authority on Native American interactions with nature, reveals as never before the omnipresence of birds in Native American life. From the time of the earliest known renderings of winged creatures in stone and earthworks through the nineteenth century, when Native southerners took part in decimating bird species with highly valued, fashionable plumage, Spirits of the Air examines the complex and changeable influences of birds on the Native American worldview. We learn of birds for which places and people were named; birds common in iconography and oral traditions; birds important in ritual and healing; and birds feared for their links to witches and other malevolent forces. Still other birds had no meaning for Native Americans. Krech shows us these invisible animals too, enriching our understanding of both the Indian-bird dynamic and the incredible diversity of winged life once found in the South. A crowning work drawing on Krech's distinguished career in anthropology and natural history, Spirits of the Air recovers vanished worlds and shows us our own anew.

Early Art of the Southeastern Indians
Early Art of the Southeastern Indians

Author: Susan C. Power

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780820325019

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Early Art of the Southeastern Indians is a visual journey through time, highlighting some of the most skillfully created art in native North America. The remarkable objects described and pictured here, many in full color, reveal the hands of master artists who developed lapidary and weaving traditions, established centers for production of shell and copper objects, and created the first ceramics in North America. Presenting artifacts originating in the Archaic through the Mississippian periods--from thousands of years ago through A.D. 1600--Susan C. Power introduces us to an extraordinary assortment of ceremonial and functional objects, including pipes, vessels, figurines, and much more. Drawn from every corner of the Southeast--from Louisiana to the Ohio River valley, from Florida to Oklahoma--the pieces chronicle the emergence of new media and the mastery of new techniques as they offer clues to their creators’ widening awareness of their physical and spiritual worlds. The most complex works, writes Power, were linked to male (and sometimes female) leaders. Wearing bold ensembles consisting of symbolic colors, sacred media, and richly complex designs, the leaders controlled large ceremonial centers that were noteworthy in regional art history, such as Etowah, Georgia; Spiro, Oklahoma; Cahokia, Illinois; and Moundville, Alabama. Many objects were used locally; others circulated to distant locales. Power comments on the widening of artists’ subjects, starting with animals and insects, moving to humans, then culminating in supernatural combinations of both, and she discusses how a piece’s artistic “language” could function as a visual shorthand in local style and expression, yet embody an iconography of regional proportions. The remarkable achievements of these southeastern artists delight the senses and engage the mind while giving a brief glimpse into the rich, symbolic world of feathered serpents and winged beings.

Visualizing the Sacred
Visualizing the Sacred

Author: George E. Lankford

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-05-23

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0292768087

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The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples. Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

What are the Animals to Us?
What are the Animals to Us?

Author: David Aftandilian

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9781572334724

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In What Are the Animals to Us? scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines explore the diverse meanings of animals in science, religion, folklore, literature, and art.

The World's Eye
The World's Eye

Author: Albert M. Potts

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0813184983

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Greek vases and Peruvian bottles, Chinese bronzes and African masks, Tel Brak idols and Egyptian tomb paintings—artifacts ancient and modern reveal man's universal fascination with the eye and his awe before its mysterious powers. In this wide-ranging and richly illustrated essay Albert M. Potts considers the special properties the human mind has ascribed to the eye over the millenia and seeks out its peculiar significance as symbol. Amulets against the Evil Eye persist today in nearly every part of the world. Almost as pervasive is the conception of the Good Eye, itself used as a protective amulet. The Eye of Horus, for example, was one of the holiest symbols of the ancient Egyptian religion, and its descendants can still be found in the Mediterranean basin. Using artifacts and texts, the folklore of our own times, and aspects of the unconscious revealed by Jungian psychology, Potts reveals the diverse forms and meanings of this powerful symbol.

The Mythic Image
The Mythic Image

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1981-11-21

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 9780691018393

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This book presents approximately 450 illustrations of mythic art from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, European, and Olmec cultures as a basis for an exploration into the relation of dreams to myth.