In the hundreds of artistic designs in the Mississippian iconographic corpus, more than sixty examples of swastikas are known to occur. The Sanskrit label “swastika” used in religious studies has been applied to this image because of its similarity to the ancient Indian symbol. Most of the Mississippian examples, however, are subtler in structure than the right-angle form of the ancient image, for most differ from crosses only in the slight curving bend at the end of the arms of an equal-armed cross.
