Etowah plates

It is generally thought that some of the plates were manufactured at Cahokia (in present-day Illinois near St Louis, Missouri) before ending up at sites in the Southeast.

The designs of the plates from these locations, together with the iconography found on artifacts at the Moundville Archaeological Site in Hale County, Alabama, were the basis from which archaeologists developed the concept of the S.E.C.C.

[1] These plates are stylistically associated with the Greater Braden Style and are thought to have been made in copper workshops at Cahokia (in Illinois near modern St Louis) in the 13th century.

[2][3][better source needed] The two plates depict a character known as the "Birdman or falcon dancer", a figure now identified as representing the Upper World in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (S.E.C.C.).

On the figures' heads are elaborate headdresses with bi-lobed arrow motifs (identical to copper plate pieces also found at the site) and beaded forelocks.

On the front of the headdress, in the forehead area, is a rectangular object, thought by scholars to represent a sacred medicine bundle.

Archaeologist James Brown has argued since the 1990s that many of the attributes of the figure depicted with the Rogan Plate coincide with the cultural hero Red Horn, described in the oral history of Ho-Chunk (and the related Iowa and Otoe-Missouria), Chiwere Siouan–speaking Indigenous peoples originating in Wisconsin.

Although fragmentary, the avian being shows evidence of having the Forked Eye motif, simple lined collar, and the scalloped wing design of the Malden plates.

Using the themes of physical prowess, fertility, and the afterlife, they identified with the Birdman ideology and displayed this symbolically through the wearing of special shell gorgets and the repoussé copper plates.

A91507, Department of Anthropology, NMNH, Smithsonian), an avian plate found in the mid-nineteenth century in a mound site near Peoria, Illinois.

Together with the iconography found on artifacts at the Moundville Archaeological Site in Hale County, Alabama, these numerous plates were the basis from which archaeologists developed the concept of the Southeast Ceremonial Complex beginning in 1945.