A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Boasting more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama is the first complete documentation of one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America. Through art, the site materializes a model or “cosmogram” of the Mississippian Native American view of the universe, offering connections between the visible and invisible worlds for Native spiritual leaders and other visitors.
Discovered by Euro-Americans in the early 1800s, the site became known as “Painted Bluff” because of its pictographs, but inexplicably it has only recently been subjected to the intensive archaeological study it deserves. Under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the authors of this volume have documented and assessed the site since 2005, and efforts have been made to reverse some of the vandalism that has occurred over many decades and to stabilize natural degradation of the cliff and its artwork.
Including more than one hundred remarkable prehistoric paintings on the cliff face that have been recorded, mapped, and photographed, this book synthesizes the research done on Painted Bluff to date and documents the entire site. Richly illustrated chapters cover the historical background, geology and archaeology, documentation methods, types of rock art, stratigraphy, paint recipes, TVA management, graffiti removal, and a summary that broadly synthesizes the meaning, timeframe, artistry, organization, conceptual boundaries, and the cosmos revealed. This groundbreaking study features 113 color photographs and a complete catalog of the pictographs and petroglyphs at the site.
In A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs from 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, Jan Simek and his colleagues present two decades of research at a precontact dark zone cave art site in East Tennessee. Discovered in 1994, 1st Unnamed Cave ushered in an extensive and systematic effort to research precontact cave art sites in the Eastern Woodlands, where the tradition of cave art production was widespread among ancient peoples. Indeed, when a preliminary report about 1st Unnamed Cave was first published in 1997, there were only seven known cave art sites across the Southeast; today, that number exceeds ninety.
From the tale of the cave’s discovery in chapter 1 to descriptions of its art in later chapters, A Dark Pathway boasts nearly one hundred maps, high-resolution photographs, and illustrations that bring the story of one of North America’s premier cave art sites to life. Importantly, Simek and his colleagues also orient 1st Unnamed Cave within the broader context of cave art sites across the Southeast, elevating them as a whole to the notable prominence they deserve. Yet his analysis does more than present and situate the discovery of 1st Unnamed Cave within the greater realm of regional cave art site studies; it also calls for the protection and preservation of these fragile sites and for the acknowledgment of the still-vibrant indigenous cultures that produced them.
With a foreword by Russell Townsend, tribal historic preservation officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, A Dark Pathway is a long-awaited volume more than twenty years in the making. Even as he delivers a comprehensive archaeological analysis, Simek’s clear presentation makes for accessible and thrilling reading not only for students of archaeology, anthropology, and Native American studies, but for interested readers as well.
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.
Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices.
Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents.
Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas.
Contributors
Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright
This collection presents, for the first time, a much-needed synthesis of the major research themes and findings that characterize the Woodland Period in the southeastern United States.
The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record.
In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.
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