The icon to the right used to navigage some pages of this website is a graphic reconstruction taken from a famous shell gorget found in the Mississippian period in the eastern part of the present United States. The wide-spread "cross-and-circle" motif represents the cosmos with the four "winds", or "grandfather" spirits, of the cardinal directions in the four quarters of creation and the great spirit in the center manifested probably as the sun. These symbols are quite in keeping with the concepts of the world held by the Shawnee and many other Native American tribes in the hisstoric period. The Shawnee, when painting a cross on a drum during the bread dance, face the top of the drum and the image towards the south. And, as most dances are counter-clockwise, the symbols are read with SOUTH at the top (the ruler of the waqrm half of the year) and NORTH at the bottom (the domain of the cold part of the year) and should, probably, be read right to left counter-clockwise -- somewhat different from the European perspective.