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3. The Petaloid Motif: A Celestial Symbolic Locative in the Shell Art of Spiro F. Kent Reilly III T he Petaloid Motif is not listed separately in the ‘‘Glossary of Motifs’’ contained within Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings Vol. 1. The petaloid border is described as a common motif in Craig A and B style engravings (Phillips and Brown 1978). The petaloid derives its name from its resemblances to the vegetative petal-shaped leaves found on flowers. However, iconographic investigations of the art of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex illustrate that the ‘‘Petaloid Motif’’ is derived from feathers. The same investigations demonstrate that the Petaloid Motif could function symbolically as an event locator or locative. Specifically, a Petaloid placed around individuals, objects, or supernaturals would identify their location as celestial. Within the corpus of Spiro shell engravings, the prominence of the Petaloid Motif, executed in the Craig style, strongly suggests that the motif set can be linked to a stylistic chronology and perhaps a specific linguistic group. During the Mississippian Period, a.d. 900–1500, particularly between a.d. 1200 and 1450, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States produced beautifully executed art objects that were oen embellished with a complex symbol system comprised of abstract images as well as anthropomorphic and zoomorphic designs. Many of these art objects are on par with the great artistic renderings of the Post-Classic cultures (a.d. 900–1521) of Mesoamerica. Stylistically, these art objects and their accompanying symbol system were identified originally as objects existing within an ideological framework that researchers named the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (Waring and Holder 1945:1–34). More recent investigations of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (secc) have shown clearly that such objects can be better understood as the artistic production of a series of ideological complexes that existed within several style regions during the Mississippian Period (Brown 1989, 1991, 1996; Muller 1966, 1989). Therefore I propose that the designator Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere 40 ancient objects and sacred realms (miis) aptly describes the specialized artistic output of the Mississippian Period as well as the belief and ritual system that these objects and symbols visualized (see Chapter 1). The presence of some degree of unity among the several Mississippian style regions and their ideological underpinnings is demonstrated by their contemporaneity , as well as by the fact that a certain number of the symbols and zoomorphic images cross style regions. This shared imagery may reflect the existence of a common ideological source or sources for the style and its symbol system. Current candidates for such miis points of origin include the art styles of the Woodland Period (1200 b.c.–a.d. 600), particularly the imagery appearing on the pottery of the Weeden Island Gulf Coast Culture (Jenkins, personal communication ) and the art and imagery of the Hopewell Culture, which developed in the Ohio Valley during the same period. Among the numerous motifs and symbol sets found within the miis, several can be demonstrated to function as symbolic locatives (Chapter 2, this volume ). Specifically, information is presented for the existence of a critical locative within the corpus of shell engravings from the Craig Mound at the site of Spiro, Oklahoma. The term locative designates a linguistic identifier applied to a word or phrase that carries the location of an action within a narrative. Within art historical analyses, locatives are important categories of motifs in systems of symbolic communication within literate and nonliterate societies. In such symbolic systems, locatives provide the initiated viewer with a visual key to identify the location of narrative imagery depicted in a work of art. Specifically, symbolic locatives in ancient artistic systems are used to identify the cosmological realm in which a certain action unfolds (Schele and Miller 1986:45–55; Reilly 1995:120–123, 2004:129–131). Returning for a moment to Mesoamerica, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that locatives functioned importantly in the art of the Classic Period Maya as well as the art of the Post-Classic Aztec and Mixtec cultures. An excellent example of such a symbolic locative in Classic Period Maya art is the ‘‘Ground Line’’ used to represent a palace floor on painted vessel scenes. This band, sometimes a single black line, functions in this instance as a locative, signaling to the viewer that the action unfolds within a structure that exists in the earthly realm. In marked contrast to these...

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