What is not speculative is the quality of the work.

The copper plates found in Mississippian burials — hammered from sheets of native copper, thin and precisely worked, sometimes covered with repoussé designs of great complexity — are among the most technically accomplished metalwork produced in pre-contact North America.

The engraved shell gorgets, incised with imagery that could fit on a medallion but that sometimes shows scenes of extraordinary narrative complexity, are masterworks of miniaturized artistic production.

At Cahokia, the center of this tradition at its height, the production of these objects was presumably organized in ways that gave the city’s elite control over the most prestigious forms of artistic and ceremonial production.