Transforming the Landscape

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.

Carol Diaz-Granados is a professional archaeologist and Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St Louis, where she has lectured for 39 years. Her major research focus is American Indian rock art, symbolism, and iconography, and associated oral traditions. Carol has written, edited, or co-edited five books, including Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos (co-edited with Jan Simek, George Sabo, and Mark Wagner, Oxbow Books, 2018). Her 2004 volume, Rock-Art of Eastern North America (co-edited with James R. Duncan) won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award. Jan F. Simek is Distinguished Professor of Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and President Emeritus of the UT System. He earned his Ph.D. in 1984 at State University of New York at Binghamton. His research interests include Paleolithic archaeology, landscape archaeology, rock art studies and cave archaeology of the southeastern United States. George Sabo, III, Ph.D., earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Michigan State University. He currently serves as a professor of anthropology and environmental dynamics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and he became director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey in 2013. His research interests are human/environment relationships, Southeastern Indian art and ritual, and American Indian interactions with European explorers and colonists. Mark J. Wagner, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Director for the Center for Archaeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His research interests include landscape and rock art studies as well as the prehistory and history of Native Americans and Europeans in Illinois and the lower Ohio River Valley.