Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief

"This is the first edited archaeology volume to broadly consider Native American religion and ritual in the eastern North America. Twenty-three archaeologists provide thematic chapters on the materials of ritual and religion in the ancient Eastern Woodlands of North America. 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 chronologically cover all time periods, from the Paleoindian period (13,000-7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the proto-historic/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"--