Amulets, effigies, fetishes, and charms : Native American artifacts and spirit stones from the Northeast /

This study of 75 portable stone petroglyph designs expands the corpus of transportable artifacts to 285 with 363 images, joining the 66 non-portable petroglyphs on bedrock and boulders dating from 6000 BP through the historical European contact period published in this volume and the author's Picture Rocks: American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast Woodlands (CH, Sep'03, 41-0398) and Making Pictures in Stone: American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast (CH, Oct'09, 47-0943). Lenik (Sheffield Archaeological Consultants) groups the pecked and incised designs into human, animal, geometric, and abstract images and hypothesizes their symbolic meanings in Algonquian and Iroquoian religious systems. The portable petroglyphs come from Maryland north to New England and Atlantic Canada and westward from Nova Scotia to New York and Ontario. Highlights include human heads and faces, bear-headed pestles, bison images, the thunderbird, fishnets, and an amazing Mississippian-period decorated monolithic stone ax that appears to be a long-distance trade item from the southeast to Connecticut. A few examples may represent astronomical features. The book includes a table of petroglyph sites and an appendix of museums holding portable petroglyphs. These three volumes contain the most current comprehensive research on the rock art of the North American mid-Atlantic and northeast. A must for those interested in Native American art and culture. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --James Bushnell Richardson, University of Pittsburgh