scholarly journals Following The Milky Way Path of Souls

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Romain
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Milky Way ◽  
American City ◽  
East Side ◽  
Cardinal Directions ◽  
Night Sky ◽  
The Dead

Cahokia was a major Native American city on the east side of the Mississippi River, across from the modern-day city of St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia flourished from c.1050 AD to c.1250. In this paper archaeoastronomic and ethnohistoric data along with computer simulations are used to explore the idea that the Cahokia site axis and the Rattlesnake Causeway were intentionally aligned to the Milky Way. It is proposed that this alignment accounts for the peculiar 5° offset of the site from the cardinal directions. Following Sarah Baires, it is suggested that Rattlesnake Causeway was a terrestrial metaphor for the Milky Way Path of Souls used by the deceased to cross to the Land of the Dead. Rattlesnake Mound at the end of the Causeway is suggested as a portal to the Path of Souls. According to ethnohistoric accounts, the Land of the Dead was guarded by a Great Serpent – suggested here as visible in the night sky as either the constellation Serpens or that of Scorpius.

A Microhistory of Human and Gastropod Bodies and Souls During Cahokia's Emergence

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Baires
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American City ◽  
Mollusc Shell ◽  
Mortuary Practice ◽  
Living World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Human Burials

This article examines the role of mortuary practice in the emergence (c. ad 1050–1100) of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian Native American city north of Mexico. The parallel partitioning of human and gastropod bodies in ridge-top mortuary mounds is examined and I argue that the presence of gastropods buried alongside human bodies served to connect the living world of humans with the watery underworld of the dead. From a microhistorical perspective, this paper focuses on the processing and deposition of bodies and their subsequent interment in ridge-top burials to parse the potential relationships between such mortuary practice and Cahokia's emergence as a complex polity. The paper presents data on the association of shell materials with human bodies from six previously excavated ridge-tops for comparison with new data on shell materials and human burials from Wilson Mound, a small ridge-top located on the western edge of Cahokia. Together, these data suggest the emergence of Cahokia was embedded in newly articulated relationships with persons enacted through the process of disarticulating the dead for burial mediated with mollusc shell.

scholarly journals Remnants of Galactic Subhalos and Their Impact on Indirect Dark-Matter Searches

Galaxies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Stref ◽  
Thomas Lacroix ◽  
Julien Lavalle
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Gamma Rays ◽  
Cold Dark Matter ◽  
Milky Way ◽  
Dark Matter Particle ◽  
Cosmic Ray ◽  
Tidal Disruption ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Boost Factor

Dark-matter subhalos, predicted in large numbers in the cold-dark-matter scenario, should have an impact on dark-matter-particle searches. Recent results show that tidal disruption of these objects in computer simulations is overefficient due to numerical artifacts and resolution effects. Accounting for these results, we re-estimated the subhalo abundance in the Milky Way using semianalytical techniques. In particular, we showed that the boost factor for gamma rays and cosmic-ray antiprotons is increased by roughly a factor of two.

Cherokee Towns and Calumet Ceremonialism in Eastern North America

2014 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Rodning
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Southern Appalachians ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Upper Midwest

Calumet ceremonialism was widely practiced by Native American and European colonial groups in the Great Plains and Southeast during the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Cultural practices associated with smoking calumet pipes have roots in the prehistoric past, but the spread of calumet ceremonialism across the Southeast was associated with the spread of European colonists and colonialism. Calumet ceremonialism served the needs for groups to have a means of creating balance, and of setting the stage for peaceful interaction and exchange, during a period marked by considerable instability and dramatic cultural change. The presence of a redstone elbow pipe bowl fragment from the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina demonstrates the participation of Cherokee towns in calumet ceremonialism, despite the remote location of this site in the southern Appalachians, far from major European colonial settlements, and far from areas such as the Mississippi River Valley and the upper Midwest where such pipes are much more common.

Dialect Identity in a Tri-Ethnic Context

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walt Wolfram ◽  
Clare Dannenberg
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Isolation ◽  
The American South ◽  
English Dialect ◽  
Native American Group

This study examines the development of a Native American Indian variety of English in the context of a rural community in the American South where European Americans, African Americans and Native American Indians have lived together for a couple of centuries now. The Lumbee Native American Indians, the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River and the largest group in the United States without reservation land, lost their ancestral language relatively early in their contact with outside groups, but they have carved out a unique English dialect niche which now distinguishes them from cohort European American and African American vernaculars. Processes of selective accommodation, differential language change and language innovation have operated to develop this distinct ethnic variety, while their cultural isolation and sense of "otherness" in a bi-polar racial setting have served to maintain its ethnic marking.

Indian Removals

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Bowes
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Old Northwest ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Treaty Negotiations ◽  
Native American Tribes ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Western Migration ◽  
The 19Th Century

Indian removals as a topic primarily encompasses the relocation of Native American tribes from American-claimed states and territories east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the Mississippi River in the first half of the 19th century. The bill passed by Congress in May 1830 referred to as the Indian Removal Act is the legislative expression of the ideology upon which federal and state governments acted to accomplish the dispossession and relocation of tens of thousands of Native American peoples during that time. Through both treaty negotiations and coercion, federal officials used the authority of removal policies to obtain land cessions and resettle eastern Indians in what is known in the early 21st century as Kansas and Oklahoma. These actions, in conjunction with non-Indian population growth and western migration, made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any tribes to remain on their eastern lands. The Cherokee Trail of Tears, which entailed the forced removal of approximately fourteen thousand men, women, and children from Georgia starting in the summer of 1838 until the spring of 1839, remains the most well-known illustration of this policy and its impact. Yet the comprehensive histories of removals encompass the forced relocations of tens of thousands of indigenous men, women, and children from throughout the Southeast as well as the Old Northwest from the 1810s into the 1850s.

Salvaging the Symbol in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-346
Author(s):  
Bryn Tales
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Asiatic Society ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Hydroelectric Dam ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead ◽  
Poetic Response

The essay seeks to set the framework by which we may appraise the efficacy of the salvaging strategies employed by Muriel Rukeyser's poetic response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia in her collection, The Book of the Dead (1938). In seeking to reclaim the lost experiences and objects of exploited miners, Rukeyser's project to salvage their anonymous suffering at the hands of capitalist greed places her as an artist within the historical materialist tradition outlined in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History (1942). The Book of the Dead explores the legacy of European capitalism's displacement of the Native-American ‘Asiatic’ society as delineated by Marx in the Grundrisse (1939). It is argued that Rukeyser aims to salvage the signs and materials of industrial conflict, such as the insurrectionary figure of John Brown, in order to begin to create the ‘always-unfinished symbol’ against the misappropriating machinations of capitalism, continuing the work of poets such as Herman Melville. The essay argues that Rukeyser's symbolic framework which aims to spur the subjective worker to action through imagination invokes a ‘Hydraulic state’, as in ancient Egypt, inspiring a quasi-religious submission to the higher unity of the hydroelectric dam and those who died creating it. Finally, we explore the implications where this spur to collective working-class action depends upon the consciousness of the human conduit: the irony at the heart of Marxist autonomy.

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