1: The Art of Indigenous Americans BEFORE 1500 C.E.

A PERFORMER DRESSED in feathered wings, tail plumes, and a hooked beak mask enters the crowded plaza and dances by torchlight to a rhythmic beat of drum and song. Gradually, in the eyes of the beholders, he transforms into a falcon (fig. 1.1).

Seven hundred years ago, in Spiro, Oklahoma, this "Birdman," as archaeologists call him, was responsible for bringing the power of the sky realm into the human community, and his ritual performance combined human-to-animal transformation, sacred warfare, and blood sacrifice, the prerogatives of chiefs. His performance would have stirred not only the citizens of Spiro, but people throughout the eastern half of the continent, where similar performances took place. Objects commemorating such ritual spectacles- like the engraved shell cup illustrated here-were exchanged over long distances and are found interred in the graves of high-ranking individuals. Clearly, a thriving society had been established here. But this was by no means the beginning of civilization in North America.

American arts had already been developing for about three thousand years by the time the Birdman's dance conjoined the powers of earth and sky.

This engraved whelk shell is only one of countless art objects that dispel the commonly held- and self-serving notion that before the arrival of Europeans America was a vast, "empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants," as the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville put it in the 1830s. On the contrary, millions of indigenous Americans, living in hundreds of Amerindian nations, inhabited North America when Europeans claimed, colonized, and began settling in the sixteenth century. Not only was the land in use, but it had been occupied by successive indigenous civilizations for several thousand years. Much of this ancient heritage of our country has been lost, principally because the construction of modern cities eradicated the ancient ones. Nevertheless, evidence of North Americans living in complex cultures, starting around 1500 B.C.E. , does survive and is widespread in the archaeological record. Many Americans have heard of Cahokia Mounds, Illinois (see fig 1.11), or visited Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (see fig. 1.17 and 1.18), but few know that over two thousand years before either of those communities flourished, people elsewhere in ancient America moved earth into huge embankments and formed mounds and enclosures (see fig. 1.3)-the beginning of an unbroken line of artistic expression among indigenous Americans that continues to the present.

This chapter presents the art of three cultural regions in ancient America: the Eastern Woodlands (the forested land extending from the Midwest to the Atlantic), the Alaskan Arctic, and the desert Southwest (Map, fig. 1.2). In each region, during the three thousand years of the "pre-contact period" (before Europeans began arriving in the sixteenth century), concepts developed that have continued to shape Native American artistic expression even down to the present. These systems of belief were entirely different from those motivating Europeans, and their persistence in indigenous visual forms, despite centuries of conquest and domination, is remarkable. The ancient arts of North America illustrate how physical and spiritual transformation was at the heart of religious experience and public ceremony. Imagery often combines human and animal aspects, sometimes referring to powerful ancestors or supernatural beings. Many Native cultures share a belief in an animating spirit that pervades all things-lightning, plants, animals, mountains, as well as people. These ideas inform the objects and ritual environments explored in what follows.

From the beginnings of human culture, trade has been on~ of the primary forms of encounter; accordingly it plays an important role in our story. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native American societies incorporated new ideas and materials through a network of long-distance trade. Their trade routes-across deserts, over mountains, and along rivers-carried not only goods and raw materials but political, religious, and artistic ideas as well; and this cultural interchange continued after the European invasion. At the hubs of these networks, settlements such as Poverty Point and Cahokia, in the east, and Chaco Canyon, in the Southwest, developed arts that included pottery, complex representational systems, and large-scale multipurpose architecture. In contrast to the earthworks of the East and stone architecture of the Southwest that we shall consider in this chapter, what are left of the ancient arts of Alaska are principally small-scale sculptures in materials such as walrus ivory. These, too, reveal fine artistic achievement at an early date. In the harsh northern climate, ceremonies were conducted inside village dance houses, rather than outside in public plazas. Nevertheless, like the art of indigenous Americans farther south, they evince a concern with the relationship of humans to the world of animals and supernatural beings.

Thumbnail: MIMBRES ARTIST, Ritual figures, Salado Region, New Mexico, c. 1350. Stone, wood, cotton, feathers, pigment and plant fiber, largest figure 25¼ in ( 64 cm) tall. Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.