American Landscapes Series

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.

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.

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.

For a period of about week in February 1865, as the Civil War was winding down and Plains Indian communities were reeling in the wake of the Sand Creek massacre, combat swept across the Nebraska panhandle, especially along the Platte River. The fighting that marked this event barely compares to the massive campaigns and terrible carnage that marked the conflict that was taking place in the eastern states but it was a significant event at the opening on the ensuing Indian Wars. Operating on terrain they knew well, Cheyenne warriors and other Native forces encountered the US Cavalry who operated within a modern network of long distance migration and pony express trails and military stations. The North Platte Campaign offers a good basis for the application of landscape approaches to conflict archaeology if only because of its scale. This fighting is both easily approached and fascinatingly encompassed. There were probably far fewer than 1000 fighters involved in those skirmishes, but before, after, and between them, they involved substantial movements of people and of equipment that was similar to the arms and gear in service to other Civil War era combatants. They also seem to have used approaches that were typical of America’s western warfare. Like many of the conflicts of interest to modern observers, the North Platte fights were between cultural different opponents. Archaeological consideration of battlefields such as Rush Creek and Mud Springs, bases, and landscapes associated with this fighting expose how the combat developed and how the opposing forces dealt with the challenges they encountered. This study draws on techniques of battlefield archaeology, focusing on the concept of ‘battlespace’ and the recovery, distribution and analysis of artifacts and weaponry, as well as historical accounts of the participants, LiDAR-informed terrain assessment, and theoretical consideration of the strategic thinking of the combatants. It applies a landscape approach to the archaeological study of war and reveals an overlooked phase of the American Civil War and the opening of the Indian Wars.

Nearly 2000 years ago, people living in the river valleys of southern Ohio built earthen monuments on a scale that is unmatched in the archaeological record for small-scale societies. The period from c. 200 BC to c. AD 500 (Early to Middle Woodland) witnessed the construction of mounds, earthen walls, ditches, borrow pits and other earthen and stone features covering dozen of hectares at many sites and hundreds of hectares at some. The development of the vast Hopewell Culture geometric earthwork complexes such as those at Mound City, Chilicothe; Hopewell; and the Newark earthworks was accompanied by the establishment of wide-ranging cultural contacts reflected in the movement of exotic and strikingly beautiful artefacts such as elaborate tobacco pipes, obsidian and chert arrowheads, copper axes and regalia, animal figurines and delicately carved sheets of mica. These phenomena, coupled with complex burial rituals, indicate the emergence of a political economy based on a powerful ideology of individual power and prestige, and the creation of a vast cultural landscape within which the monument complexes were central to a ritual cycle encompassing a substantial geographical area. The labour needed to build these vast cultural landscapes exceeds population estimates for the region, and suggests that people from near (and possibly far) travelled to the Scioto and other river valleys to help with construction of these monumental earthen complexes. Here, Mark Lynott draws on more than a decade of research and extensive new datasets to re-examine the spectacular and massive scale Ohio Hopewell landscapes and to explore the society that created them.

In this major, highly illustrated, new study Tim Perttula explores the cultural and social landscape of the Caddo Indian peoples (hayaanuh) for about 1000 years between c. 900 and 1900 AD. There were continual changes in the character and extent of ancestral landscapes, through times of plenty, risk, and hardship, as well as in relationships between different communities of Caddo peoples dispersed or concentrated across the landscape at different points in time. These ancestral peoples, in all their diversity of origins, material culture, subsistence, and rituals and religious beliefs, actively created their societies by establishing connected places on the land that became home and lead to the formation of social networks across environments with a diverse mosaic of resources. Established places lent order to the chaotic worlds of people and nature, and they embodied history and the cosmos here on earth. Caddo Landscapes explores the ancestral Caddo constructed landscape, providing detailed information on earthen mounds, specialized non-mound structures, domestic settlements and their key facilities as well as associated gardens and fields, and places where salt, clay, lithic raw materials, and other materials were obtained and the social ties that linked communities in numerous ways. The character and key sequences of ceramics are discussed and radiometric dating evidence provided.

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