Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas

About the Author: J. Grant Stauffer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His doctoral research is on landscape transformations, mound building, and coalescence at the Cahokia site in Illinois. His research interests include iconographic analysis, ceramic analysis, geoarchaeology, geophysical prospection in archaeology, and their applications in the Eastern Woodlands of North America.
Bretton T. Giles is Assistant Research Professor in the Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Department at Kansas State University. He serves as KSU supervisory archaeologist at the Fort Riley Army Installation in north-central Kansas.
Shawn P. Lambert is an assistant professor of anthropology and senior research associate with the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University. He is also a co-editor of the book, New Methods and Theories for Analyzing Mississippian Imagery.
This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.