This page groups sacred sites by whether their sacred status is still actively maintained. Wikipedia notes that Mircea Eliade "argues that while the concept of a sacred space is often associated with religious traditions, it is not exclusive to them," since secular societies can keep treating a place as significant too. Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a site with living religious observance apart from one preserved mainly for its history.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingPlatform-mound and plaza centres of the maize-farming societies of the North American Southeast and mid-continent, built between roughly 1000 and 1600 CE, in which the flat-topped mound, the open plaza and the ruler's residence formed one ceremonial and political arrangement. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredThe descendants are living nations, among them the Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Caddo, Osage and Quapaw. The emptying of the mound centres was a dispersal rather than a disappearance. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsMississippian is an archaeologists' label for a shared complex of maize agriculture, platform mounds and iconography. It is a period and a culture-type, not a people: the societies it covers spoke Muskogean, Siouan, Caddoan and other unrelated languages. 2 Learn More
Mississippian Sacred Sites
This small group gathers a sacred site of the Mississippian culture, the mound-building societies of the North American Southeast and Midwest, whose great platform mounds and plazas, as at Cahokia, were the centres of a complex ceremonial and political order.
The browser will find the site the atlas classes here. The entry describes what is known of its religious and ceremonial role.
Practice Status
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi
Timothy R. Pauketat, Viking, 2009on Mississippian towns and mounds
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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