The artistic tradition of the Mississippian world, of which Cahokia was the greatest center, is one of the most distinctive and visually striking in the pre-contact Americas — and it is one that most Americans have never encountered, despite the fact that it was produced on what is now American soil over several centuries.

The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex — a term archaeologists use to describe the shared symbolic system that united Mississippian communities across a huge geographic area — produced objects of extraordinary refinement in copper, marine shell, stone, and ceramic.

The images engraved on shell gorgets and copper plates, and modeled in ceramic vessels, reveal a rich symbolic vocabulary: winged human figures, the Long-Nosed God, dancing warriors in elaborate costumes, serpents, falcons, the Morning Star, the hand-eye motif, the forked eye — a repertoire of symbols that appears with remarkable consistency across sites from Oklahoma to Georgia to Ohio to Missouri.

The consistency of this symbolic vocabulary across such a large area is one of the most remarkable facts about the Mississippian world.