Dr. Townsend has participated in explorations of a Missouri cave with American Indian wall paintings featuring huntsmen, warriors, drummers, and chieftains with lively poses, gestures, and implements. The figures show affinities with the 13th-century art of urban Cahokia, whose archaeological monuments stand in Illinois opposite St. Louis. That age all but disappeared by the 19th century, transformed by the introduction of horses and proliferating herds of bison. Many tribes took to an equestrian life on the Plains, yet their pictographic art on hides and garments shows the adaptation of an ancient cosmological world-view, seen in Cahokia and the cave drawings, in which all activities were bound to the earth's cycle of birth, death, and renewal.  

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Cheyenne. Victory Record of the Elkhorn Scraper Warrior Society from a Painted Tipi Curtain (detail), c. 1870. Lent by the Foundation for the Preservation of American Indian Art and Culture,