Professional archaeologists working in eastern North America have paid somewhat less attention to rock art studies than those working in other parts of the world, to our detriment. Dedicated to Dr. Fred E. Coy, Jr., an avocational archaeologist and pioneer of North American rock art studies, this volume begins to remedy that oversight by demonstrating how we can incorporate these durable and expressive material remains into interpretations of eastern North American lifeways. In their introductory chapter, Sabo and Simek emphasize cultural landscapes as frameworks for rock art study, offering several ethnographic examples of the ubiquitous “practice of making beliefs visible” (p. 3). These and examples throughout the book demonstrate that for native North Americans, spirituality resides in both natural and built landscapes. Rock art locations are not randomly distributed, nor are rock art motifs. Rather, creators of rock art chose natural landscape features that were spiritually charged—bluffs, springs, caves, rivers, rock faces, and whirlpools—and that existed within constellations of cultural features such as mortuary sites, earthen mounds, villages, and artifact caches. In addition to incorporating Native American beliefs about the physical and metaphysical world, authors consider spatial distribution, motifs, style, and chronology. Organized by region, the coverage includes portions of what are now Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina.

Despite the volume's primary focus on the Mississippi period and late prehistory, chapters by Wagner and colleagues, Simek and colleagues, and Loubser and colleagues consider art produced beginning during the Archaic period, demonstrating continual ritual modification of the landscape from an early date. Although rock art can be difficult to date directly, authors develop local rock art chronologies using “motif overlap sequences” and comparisons with local stylistic traditions executed on portable artifacts. Loubser and colleagues, for instance, equate rock art motifs at Sprayberry Rock in northern Georgia with Middle Woodland and Middle Mississippian ceramic stamp designs (see also Sabo et al.’s equation of design motifs at sites along the White River in northeastern Arkansas with Greenbriar phase [ca. AD 1450–1600] populations in the same area). Several chapters argue that rock art is an additive practice and that Native Americans frequently incorporated existing ritual landscapes into new and transformed practices and interpretations.

Significantly, contributors point to the increased occurrence and complexity of rock art associated with the Cahokian diaspora and religious beliefs that circulated within it. Representations of a three-tiered cosmos and/or center and portal symbols were executed at scales ranging from single-surface tableaux to regional cosmograms incorporating multiple rock art sites with contrasting imagery. Rock art creators on the Ozark Escarpment of Missouri and Arkansas used major rivers to orient these regional arrangements, including the Big River, along which the “Big Five” sites discussed by Duncan and Diaz-Granados are organized from south to north, and the Arkansas River, discussed by Sabo and colleagues, which divides rock art sites according to their above world (north) and this world (south) imagery. Simek and colleagues discuss how rock art on the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee and northeast Alabama incorporates elements of elevation, aspect, and color to convey meaningful associations with different domains of the cosmos. Other Mississippian themes include scenes depicting the exploits of culture heroes, including First Woman, the spirit of the Earth in Dhegihan (Osage) oral tradition (Duncan and Diaz-Granados); Red Horn, a semidivine Siouan culture hero (Wagner et al.); and Judaculla, Master of Game, in the Cherokee tradition (Loubser et al.).

Several authors stress the ability of rock art to express social identities and social boundaries. Wagner and colleagues argue that public art at Millstone Bluff links recent migrants to their cultural and religious heritage, while nearby, art at Bay Creek was secluded and private, the result of individual practitioners. This dichotomy between visible, accessible rock art meant for public consumption and secluded, inaccessible rock art produced by a few ritual specialists is also discussed in Chapters 4, 6, and 7. Simek and colleagues additionally consider the ways rock art expresses political and cultural boundaries, noting differences in the subject matter of rock art sites corresponding to Fort Ancient and Mississippian cultural groups in present-day Kentucky and between the Mississippian populations of the Black Warrior Valley and those to the north. Sabo and colleagues suggest that rock art sites with differing themes were associated with distinct social groups, perhaps clans or sodalities, among Greenbriar phase people living on the Ozark Escarpment of northeast Arkansas.

This review merely scratches the surface of the complex interactions among people, rock art, and natural and built landscape features explored by the contributors to this volume. Taken together, these works challenge 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.