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Author raises questions about the looting of the lost Indian burial crypt in Le Flore Co OK in 1935.
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"In eastern Oklahoma, on the banks of the Arkansas River, lies one of the most important ancient sites ever identified - the Spiro Mounds. Although they created one of the most highly-developed civilizations, the Spiroan people and their Mississippian peers are nearly forgotten in the pages of history. Explore the art, history, and singular nature of this ancient site as it rose from humble beginnings to become the most unique cultural and ceremonial center in pre-European contact North America. The quality, quantity, and variety of items discovered at Spiro is staggering. Thousands of objects, created in many different mediums, bear images of people deities, deity impersonators, animals, and mysterious composite creatures. Together, these objects form pictorial narratives that provide critical insight into the lives of the Mississippian people. Today's Native American communities in the American Southeast and the Plains, and possibly in Mesoamerica, are linked to Spiro through their use of similar imagery in historical works - hide paintings, ledger drawings, and tipi and shield covers - as well as in their twentieth-century paintings, sculpture, ceramics, basketry, and weavings. The story of Spiro is not limited to the past or focused solely on art. It is reflected in the everyday lives of people today. It is a story of how religion and the environments shape us, as illustrated through community developments, religious and ceremonial activities, farming and hunting practices, and daily life. Learn how a "Little Ice Age" beginning in AD 1350 and lasting until AD 1650 may have led to the site's decline and ultimate abandonment - an environmental threat similar to one we face today"--Book jacket.
Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC). This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.