The artistic record of the Mississippian tradition includes representations of female figures — both in ceramics and in engraved shell and copper objects — that suggest women had roles in the religious and ceremonial life of the culture that went beyond passive participation.

Female imagery appears in contexts associated with fertility, agriculture, and the cosmic order, suggesting that women’s roles in the symbolic system were significant.

The specific interpretation of these images is contested, as is appropriate given the difficulty of reading religious symbolism from archaeological evidence alone.

The broader question of how social gender was organized at Cahokia — whether there were recognized gender roles beyond male and female, how those roles were defined and enforced, and how gender intersected with status and economic activity — is one that the archaeological evidence cannot fully answer.

But the growing attention to gender in Cahokia archaeology is producing richer interpretations of the city’s social life than the earlier, more narrowly focused scholarship had achieved.