A pre-Columbian map of the Mississippi?

Abstract

A unique petroglyph panel in southeastern Missouri appears to be a cartographic depiction of the Mississippi River, a series of Middle Mississippian places, and, perhaps, social or political identities (ca. A.D. 1200-1400). The panel, part of the Commerce Quarry and Petroglyph site, sits adjacent to a millennia-old Mississippi River crossing on a prominent natural feature which also was a likely raw-material source for the production of quartzite chunkey stones. The Commerce map is the oldest known cartographic representation in eastern North America, marking a significant location in regional space and Mississippian cultural history. Maps are not unique to any period or people in world history, although cartographic inscriptions are rare in many places prior to literate periods. Such seems the case for pre-Columbian eastern North America, where few maps illustrating geographic features are known (see Lafferty 1994; Mallery 1893; Warhus 1997). Our documentation of a periodically submerged rock-art site at Commerce, Missouri, leads us to conclude that such maps existed as early as the Mississippian period (A.D. 1050-1600). The rock-art panel in question is located at the Commerce Quarry and Petroglyph site (23ST295) in southeast Missouri and likely dates to between A.D. 1200 and 1400. Based on comparisons with other known historic era maps and with other known or suspected rock-art maps in North America and Mesoamerica, we believe that American Indians plotted the locations of particular Mississippian period settlements, if not also political or cultural identities at the Commerce site (Figure 1). Not incidentally, this place was a prominent landmark, a kaolin clay source, and possibly a quartzite quarry site for the production of chunkey stones. In the following discussion, we outline our reasons for arguing that the rock-art panel was a map. Background: Pre-Columbian Maps? Premodern American Indian maps, according to Mark Warhus (1997:3), must be understood in broad terms: It is necessary to suspend western preconceptions of what makes a map. Unlike western cartography, where the primary document is the physical map and the conventions of scale, longitude, latitude, direction, and relative location are believed to scientifically depict a static landscape, Native American maps are pictures of experience. They are formed in the human interaction with the land and are a record of the events that give it meaning. A map, in such terms, is a scaled-down representation of people, places, things, or experiences in geographic or cosmographie space. Given such an open definition, most anything that depicts geographic or cosmographie relationships in microcosm might qualify as a map. For instance, the space inside a domicile, the decorations on a ceramic pot, or the painting on a hide might represent the directionality or associations of the celestial sphere and its supernatural forces (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Horse Capture et al. 1993; Pauketat and Emerson 1991; Warhus 1997). A particularly good example of this is a well-known nineteenth-century Pawnee painted-hide star chart (Murie 1981). However, many public or sacred spaces, monuments, or the organization of certain places might have projected maplike images of the cosmos (Birmingham and Eisenberg 2000; Hall 1985; see also Eliade 2005; Wheatley 1971). Thus it is no stretch to suggest that motifs at certain rock-art sites if not also the array of rock-art sites within a region might map out stories or act as mnemonic devices, enabling readers to place social or religious narratives or memories in larger historical and cosmological contexts (e.g., Wagner et al. 2004). In some ways, many pre-Columbian or early colonial drawings or paintings were similar to such spatialized narratives that located people in the world or cosmos. Clearly, there were indigenous maps prior to the arrival of the Europeans. One was presented to the Spaniard Cortes, for instance, by the Aztec ruler Moteuczoma Xocoyotl (Cortes 1986:94). …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.