The same imagery appears in burial mounds in northern Georgia, in temple mound sites in Alabama, in the great mound complex at Spiro in Oklahoma, and at Cahokia itself.

This cannot be explained by coincidence.

It reflects a shared religious and cosmological tradition that was maintained across the Mississippian world through the same trade networks that moved copper from Lake Superior to the Gulf Coast and marine shell from the Gulf to the Great Lakes.

The specific meaning of individual Mississippian symbols is not fully understood — the people who used them did not leave written explanations, and the interpretations that scholars have proposed are based on comparative analysis of the imagery with the oral traditions of Southeastern Native nations, with historical accounts from the early colonial period, and with the archaeological contexts in which the objects appear.

Some of the connections are relatively secure; others are more speculative.