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Jan Simek - Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos - 9781785706288 - V9781785706288
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Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos

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Description for Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos Paperback. .
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.

Product Details

Publisher
Oxbow Books
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2018
Condition
New
Number of Pages
288
Place of Publication
Oxford, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781785706288
SKU
V9781785706288
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-50

About Jan Simek
Carol Diaz-Granados, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St Louis, where she has taught since 1980. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology there in 1993. Her main research interests include American Indian art and iconography, rock art, body art/body modification across cultures, and urban archaeology. 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.

Reviews for Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos
I commend the editors for their daring vision and timely contribution to American rock art scholarship.
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
Organised into seven thought-provoking chapters, each accompanied by high-quality images, this book will be an important contribution into understanding regional rock-art trends in a continent that has a complex, dynamic and distinct range in its rock-art assemblages.
Current World Archaeology
...challenge[s] archaeologists to think beyond customarily considered relationships among people, portable objects, and architecture and to consider rock art as one of many contexts through which native peoples of eastern North America expressed their understandings of animate landscapes.
American Antiquity

Goodreads reviews for Transforming the Landscape: Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos


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