1. Pre-Columbian Art of North America
Archaic
Eastern Woodland
Adena
Hopewell
Mississippian
Algonquian and Iroquoian

3. Pre-Columbian refers to art before Native American made contact with Europeans—literally “before Columbus.”
Archaeologists refer to several overlapping periods of pre-Columbian cultures of the East Coast:
Archaic 6000 BCE – 500 BCE
Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE -800 CE
Adena 1000 BCE – 100 BCE
Hopewell 200 BCE – 500 CE
Mississippian 800 CE – 1600 CE
Algonquian and Iroquoian 1000 CE – 1600 CE
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE, plan: Archaic

4. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point, Louisiana, aerial view. The site has been known by Europeans since the early 19th century, but was not studied in depth until the 1950s.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE, plan

5. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

6. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE, plan

7. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Mound A, Poverty Point, Louisiana, built with 238,000 cubic meters of fill deposited in just three months sometime between 1450 and 1250 BCE (based on carbon dating of a burn layer at bottom of the mound).
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

8. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

9. The White Temple and Ziggurat, above, from Uruk (Warka), Iraq, B.C, was built more than two thousand years before Mound A at Poverty Point, to elevate a temple dedicated to Ur, the Sumerian god of the sky. It was placed in the center of Uruk, which was one of the world’s first cities.
The people who used Poverty Point were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and did not build a city there.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

10. Poverty Point, Louisiana, c. 1500 BCE
The Great Pyramids, above, from Giza, Egypt, were built as burial tombs in Egypt, c BCE, about a thousand years before Poverty Point.
There is no evidence that Mound A was used as a burial mound.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

11. North and Central American Civilizations, c. 1000 BCE
The Olmec civilization, in the Yucatan Peninsula, was the first culture to create permanent settlements in the Americas—around 1000 BCE. Poverty Point was created by nomadic people a few hundred years earlier, sometime between 1450 and 1250 BCE.
North and Central American Civilizations, c BCE

12. The Great Pyramid at La Venta, BCE, Tabasco, Mexico (Olmec Civilization). One of the earliest pyramids known in Mesoamerica, the Great Pyramid is 110 ft (33 m) high and contains an estimated 100,000,000 cubic meters of earth fill. The current shape of the pyramid was once thought to represent nearby volcanoes or mountains, but recent work by Rebecca Gonzalez-Lauck has shown that the pyramid was in fact a rectangular pyramid with stepped sides and inset corners, and the current shape is most likely due to 2500 years of erosion.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

13. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Archaeologists have discovered clay cooking balls, small female figurines, stone gorgets (for protecting the neck in battle), fishing weights and bars, and tiny sculptures and beads depicting animals at Poverty Point that date to c BCE
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

14. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point clay figurines, c BCE
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

15. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point stone gorgets (for protecting the neck in battle), fishing weights and bars, c BCE
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

16. Archaic Pre-Columbian (2000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point miniature stone owl and a penny, c BCE.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

17. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point miniature stone beads, c BCE. Some of the stones used to create these beads originated from quarries as far away as the Great Lakes, attesting to their wide-reaching culture of trade.
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

18. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Poverty Point miniature stone beads, c BCE. Some of the stones used to create these beads originated from quarries as far away as the Great Lakes, attesting to their wide-reaching culture of trade.

19. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
Was this mound created to resemble a bird? If so, what does this say about the archaic culture of Poverty Point?
Poverty Point, Louisiana, c BCE

20. Archaic 6000 BCE – 1000 BCE
Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE -800 CE
Adena 1000 BCE – 100 BCE
Hopewell 200 BCE – 500 CE
Mississippian 800 CE – 1600 CE
Algonquian and Iroquoian 1000 CE – 1600 CE

21. Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE -800 CE
Falcon-shaped cut out, copper, 200 BCE – 1 CE, from Mound City, Ohio

22. Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE -800 CE Archaic 6000 BCE – 1000 BCE
Falcon-shaped cut out, copper, 200 BCE – 1 CE, from Mound City, Ohio
Poverty Point miniature stone beads, c BCE. Some of their possessions originated from quarries as far away as the Great Lakes, attesting to the extent of complex culture of trade.

23. Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE -800 CE
Falcon-shaped cut out, copper, 200 BCE – 1 CE, from Mound City, Ohio
Raven Effigy Tobacco Pipe, Woodland Culture, Rutherford Mound, Illinois, c. 200 BCE to 200 CE, 2 3/8 x 4 ¾ inches
The left end of the platform is the mouthpiece.
Even today, many Native Americans believe that fire and smoke to be sacred because they move upward toward the heavens.
According to the Illinois State Museum’s website, when the smoker faces the head of the effigy, the smoker may have been in contact with the spirit of the raven. The act of smoking could have effected a transformation of the smoker into an raven. In Native American cosmology, raven is often described as a Trickster or a symbol of power (

24. Eastern Woodland 1000 BCE - 800 CE Mississippian 800 to 1400 CE
Falcon-shaped cut out, copper, 200 BCE – 1 CE, from Mound City, Ohio
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches

25. Mississippian 800 to 1400 CE
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches

26. Mississippian 800 to 1400 CE
Castalian Springs Mound Shell Gorget, Castalian Springs, Sumner County, Tennessee, CE
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches

27. Archaic Pre-Columbian (6000 to 500 BCE)
According to Professor John Grim of Bucknell University:
“Native American rituals not only bind human communities together but they invite reciprocal participation of the individual and the community with the ancestral lineages, and through the many spirits of the cosmos, back again into the life of the local biological environment, or bioregion.
. . .
“…it can be said of indigenous visionary experience that when spiritual light illumines any one aspect of this indigenous mystical quaternity, it is as if all four dimensions of the personal, communal, spiritual, and bioregional are synthesized into a coherent whole. Such a visionary episteme allows meaning to arise in the synaesthesia of images, performances and thought rather than deriving it solely by means of rational analysis, cognitive discourse, or devotional prayer.”
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches

28. Mississippian 800 to 1400 CE
“Uktena” design from a shell engraving found at the Spiro Site in Oklahoma, c CE; according to Cherokee legend, Ukenta was a man turned into a snake to battle the angry sun.
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches

29. Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches
What does this diagram of the Andean cosmology suggest about the world-view of Native Americans?
Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacut Yamqui Salcamaygua, Andean cosmological diagram based on the altar of the temple of Koricancha, Cuzco, Mexico, from Relación de Antigüedades, 1613 CE

30. Mississippian 800 to 1400 CE
Ceremonial shell cup engraved with the Birdman, from Spiro Mounds, OK, c CE, Shelk shell, 5 x 11 x 7 inches
Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio, c. 1066

31. Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio, c. 1066

32. Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio, c. 1066

33. Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio, c. 1066
Serpent Mount—Our Ohio, 2008, 5:47

34. Cahokia, Illinois, c CE
Great Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio, c. 1066

35. Cahokia, Illinois, c
Monk's Mound, Cahokia, Illinois, c , 100 feet tall and covering 16 acres, near Saint Louis, Missouri

36. Cahokia, Illinois, c CE
Monk's Mound, Cahokia, Illinois, c , 100 feet tall and covering 16 acres

37. Monk's Mound, Cahokia, Illinois, c. 900-1200, reconstruction drawing
No tipis! They lived in mud-brick structures with straw roofs.
Cahokia, Illinois, c CE

38. Monk's Mound, Cahokia, Illinois, c. 900-1200, reconstruction drawing
Uxmal Pyramid, Yucatan, Mexico, c. 900 CE

39. Reconstruction of the great ruler buried in Mound 72, in the Cahokia
Cahokia, Illinois, c CE

40. Reconstruction of the great ruler buried in Mound 72, in the Cahokia
Much like the pyramids in Mexico, only a few of the mounds served as burial sites.

41. Anasazi... (i.e. Ancestors)
(700 to 1300 CE)

42. Anasazi... (i.e. Ancestors) (700 to 1300 CE)
Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, CE
Anasazi... (i.e. Ancestors)
(700 to 1300 CE)

43. Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, 850-1150 CE

44. Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, 850-1150 CE

45. Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, 850-1150 CE

46. Pueblo Bonito was the center of turquoise trade
Pueblo Bonito was the center of turquoise trade. Turquoise beads from Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. Beads were a prestige good as well as a medium of exchange.
Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, CE

47. Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, 850-1150 CE
Anasazi Olla, c. 1150, from Arizona

48. The Great Kiva. Some kivas were used for ceremonial or religious purposes. Others were used as domestic spaces.
Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, CE

49. The Great Kiva
Reconstructed Great Kiva at the Aztec Ruins National Monument. This kiva was completely restored in the 1930s by Earl Morris after he excavated it a couple of decades earlier.  Like many other examples of rebuilding, however, the Great Kiva is now generally thought to be inaccurate in some respects, most notably the roof level, which is almost certainly too high.

50. The Great Kiva
Monk's Mound, Cahokia, Illinois, c , 100 feet tall and covering 16 acres

51. Reconstruction model of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, NM, 850-1150 CE
Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde, Colorado: 217 rooms and 23 kivas, 1190 to 1260 CE

52. Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde, Colorado: 217 rectangular rooms and 23 kivas, 1190 to 1260 CE

53. Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde, Colorado: 217 rooms and 23 kivas, 1190 to 1260 CE
Timothy O'Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelly, New Mexico, 1873, albumen print from a glass negative

54. Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde, Colorado: 217 rooms and 23 kivas, 1190 to 1260 CE
Mimbres Artist, Bowl with Koshare (clown) figure and “kill hole,” Pruitt Site, New Mexico, c CE, clay and pigment, 9 inch diameter

55. Mimbres bowls with kill holes, c. 1100 CE
Mimbres Artist, Bowl with Koshare (clown) figure and “kill hole,” Pruitt Site, New Mexico, c CE, clay and pigment, 9 inch diameter