Transforming the Landscape ─ Rock Art and the Mississippean Cosmos

Over the past 25 years, major rock art research has been performed in the North American eastern woodlands – in Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and North Carolina. Because of the enormity of the eastern landscape and the growing number of rock art sites, the editors of Transforming the Landscape decided to focus in on the topic of cultural landscapes and cosmology – that is, the graphic reflection of beliefs about the cosmos within rock art imagery and how this art is located across a region since, unlike portable cultural material, rock art provides in situ evidence of ritual activity that links ideology and place. This constitutes a major component of pre-contact petroglyphs and pictographs – and a fascinating one at that. In this beautifully illustrated volume leading rock art specialists cover a wide range of methodologies regarding the placement of rock art on the landscape as well as various approaches to uncovering meaning in the rock art imagery during the Mississippian Period (post AD 900). Authors discuss compelling connections between the imagery and cultural materials, including oral traditions collected by ethnographers from American Indians in the 19th century and more recently, 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.