Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World (Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)

by George E. Lankford

The Foreground layer on the Thruston Tablet bears a generic resemblance to the wall painting found at the Gottschall

Rockshelter in Wisconsin

Dieterle (2005) has argued that the Gottschall imagery represents a story of the Twins, although this interpretation remains in dispute

The Leg that constitutes a layer by itself has parallels in ceramic leg effigies from both the Middle Cumberland region and the Central Mississippi Valley

Severed body parts are known to have served as war trophies

we may speculate that

this composition was an allusion to t...

From a stylistic perspective, the Thruston Tablet is unique. Its manner of depicting human figural elements does not conform to or closely resemble any of the currently defined styles in the Mississippian world. Nonetheless, a few commonalities of style and subject matter help with relationships and dating.

All in all, considering both subject matter and style, we see the Thruston Tablet as having many affinities with Hightower and Braden material and fewer with Hemphill and Craig.

The Thruston Tablet probably represents a yet-unnamed style that, like Hightower and Hemphill, is an eastern offshoot or “branch” of the Late Braden style (Brown 2004:108–109).

we believe the Thruston Tablet is both a palimpsest and a storyboard.

We see this story as mythic rather than historical in character and suggest that has to do with the Twins, supernatural heroes whose many exploits, in countless versions, were recounted by Native storytellers across North America.

Thruston Tablet shows strong thematic and stylistic connections to Mississippian imagery over a wide area. So a question remains: what might account for these connections?

the Thruston Tablet’s artist may have had access to the work of the Lightner artist, who was a master of the Braden A or Classic Braden style, which, if Brown (2004) is correct, may have originated in the vicinity of Cahokia. Thus the Lightner artist’s work, and the Classic Braden corpus in general, may have provided a canonical model for aspects of the imagery on the Thruston Tablet.

with the Lightner Cup, here we see direct evidence of connections with the products of another regional group of artisans, perhaps located in northern Georgia, which also may have provided prototypes for elements of the tablet.

It may well be that the story cycles involving the Twins had particular importance in the spiritual or political life of the people who lived in this region. This

Even if it was made elsewhere, we may speculate that the local people especially sought items from far away that depicted the themes most relevant to them.

there is no single “Southeastern Ceremonial Complex” but rather a series of regional manifestations, each with its own style and thematic emphases.

Excavations at the Averbuch site in Davidson County, Tennessee, in the late 1970s uncovered a remarkably pristine Late Mississippian–period palisaded settlement with three separate cemeteries that together yielded over 600 burials containing over 800 individual human remains as well as artifacts in stone, shell, bone, and ceramic—all carefully documented in a substantial site report

among the ceramic items preserved from the site are three hooded female effigy bottles

all three of these figurative vessels depict humpbacked females is not surprising:

humpbacked figures are extremely common

what is striking about the Averbuch effigy bottles is that, while all three share

stylistic similarities, one of them (Fig. 8.1) was decorated with a particular negative-painted pattern

Although their numbers may well be fewer, straight-backed examples of female effigies are also abundant in the Nashville area, and they contrast markedly with these humpbacked figures.

the humpbacked female effigies and the straight-backed ones are intended to represent the same character, based on our examination. First and foremost, all or nearly all, as far as we know, were recovered from stone-box graves of children (or at the very least subadults) of the Thruston phase, AD 1250–1400, and share similar deposition in mortuary contexts

the depiction of a cloaklike garment that is common to many of these straight-backed and humpbacked effigies, rendered in black-on-white-slip or black-on-buff-paste negative painting, exemplifying the ceramic type known as “Nashville Negative Painted”

these were most likely ceremonial garments, with the large-scale patterns recognizable at a distance. The inclusion of shoulder roundels on these effigy vessels and related figurines may also reflect the ability of the makers of Mississippian textiles to create complex designs that actually contain such concentric elements.

Among these is a highly prominent feature that we initially chose to call a “neck knob,” principally because its significance was not entirely clear to us.

On the whole, we have come to interpret this element as a hair-bun, suggesting the gathered and folded ends of hair, which yield the saddle-back form on the most explicit or carefully articulated examples. Overall we take it to be one of the markers that this figure’s sex is female.

the female vessels and figurines from the Cumberland region depict several distinct hairstyles, shared by a variety of humpbacked and straight-backed effigies. These may prove to be indicators of social or religious significance or may instead reflect the mark of their maker or workshop.

we believe that a skirt line indicating a knee-length skirt is a primary marker

of sex and in combination with the cloaklike garment forms the foremost determinant and identity marker.

the two physical forms of these female effigies are intended to represent the same character or individual. Furthermore, this physical dualism is only a reflection of the life span of this female character (the stages of her life, so to speak), from the trim, upright physique of a young woman, through various intermediary stages, to the heavier morphology of an old woman, humpbacked not from disease but simply from advanced age

And each subgroup was ultimately used to fulfill the same function in funeral rites, especially those of infants and children. Overall, the characteristics of these female effigy vessels—and numerous additional examples from these same counties and others nearby that require further study—unite them as representations of the same possibly supernatural personage who was venerated or invoked in the practices of a mortuary cult complex across the Cumberland River basin

Seeking the identity of this young/old woman in the patterned shawl is an important task, although it is beyond the limits of this chapter. There are possible candidates for the female divinity in the mythology of Algonkians, Siouans, Iroquoians, and Muskhogeans

Some scholars, for example, have suggested that the related female figurines from the Mississippi Valley should be understood as images of a corn divinity or the Siouan Earth Mother best known from the Mandan and Hidatsa myths

Meanwhile, the stylistic differences that are evident among these effigy vessels sharpen

our awareness that we are dealing with intersite and intrasite complexities of interaction.

Together with Etowah and Spiro, Moundville was once routinely included as one of the “big three” primary centers contributing to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,

we have increasingly appreciated that much of the art once lumped under the heading “Southeastern Ceremonial Complex” does not form a coherent complex at all, either stylistically or thematically.

Despite some generalized similarities based on a shared cultural substrate, Mississippian finely crafted art is in fact realized in a number of distinct, inherently local styles, emphasizing different subject matter and different media.

Styles are defined by inferring their rules of depiction, or canons, from a large corpus of examples, with particular attention to how these canons contrast with other styles.

we advocate style definitions that reflect communities of closely interacting artists on a very limited geographic scale.

At each major Mississippian site, it is apparent that the collection of skillfully crafted goods and representational art found there is actually a melange of locally and nonlocally produced goods

Objects acquired from afar often express original themes and concepts that are foreign to the context in which they are found. But by using combinations of geological and stylistic criteria, we can distinguish local from nonlocal goods.

These rules of depiction have been helpful in discriminating locally made engraved vessels at Moundville from those few found there that are engraved in nonlocal styles.

1. A strong conservatism in composition, execution, and choice of theme. The vast majority of Hemphill compositions fall into a small number of redundantly executed themes. Design structures are few in number.

2. Multiple elements within a given composition are shown apart from one another in the design field, emblemlike, without overlap and without obvious interaction among the components.

3. Avoidance of overlap extends to the component figures in a larger design;