Mississippian stone statuary

Early European explorers reported seeing stone and wooden statues in native temples, but the first documented modern discovery was made in 1790 in Kentucky, and given as a gift to Thomas Jefferson.

Early European explorers describe stone statues as being kept in mortuary temples or shrines, frequently on top of platform mounds.

Over the next several hundred years the statues disappeared from history, many of them hidden by Native Americans to protect their sacred objects.

For many years the statues were thought to have been produced locally at the sites in which they were discovered, but recent scientific analysis (X-ray diffraction, sequential acid dissolution, and inductively coupled plasma analyses)[4] has shown all of the statues to have been produced from a flint clay only found in the vicinity of St. Louis, Missouri.

[2][5] The particular pipestone used by the artists of Cahokia has a distinctive combination of a lithium bearing chlorite, abundant boehmite (an aluminium oxyhydroxide) and a heavy-metal phosphate mineral suite.

[7] The second example from the site is the "Keller figurine", which depicts a woman with long straight hair and cranial deformation, wearing a wrap-around skirt and kneeling on a platform.

The figure, obviously a female from the surviving anatomy of the torso, wears a wrap around skirt and holds plants and woven cane baskets.

[2] Archaeologists believe several pipes found at the site may be heirlooms that made their way from Cahokia to Spiro in the late 13th century as the cultural center collapsed.

Archaeologist have argued that the figure may represent Red Horn, a mythic demigod from many Native American stories.

He wears a cape of feathers on his back, similar to actual examples found in the Craig Mound during excavations.

He has Long-nosed god maskette earrings, strings of beads around his neck,[10] and strapped to his head is a sacred bundle incorporating what is thought to be a copperplate with an Ogee motif at its center.

The 24 centimeters (9.4 in) figure depicts a warrior in ritual regalia leaning over a crouching victim and either hitting him in the face with a war club[10] or decapitating him.

Although the figure lacks definitive sexual characteristics, the fact that it is grinding maize and details of its costumes suggest it is indeed a representation of a female.

Other sites have produced single examples of the Cahokia flint clay statues and pipes, in locations scattered throughout the American South.

The sitting figure has long hair which winds down her back, a skirt, and is holding forward a conch shell that is believed to have connections with the watery underworld of the Mississippian cosmology.

[14] A 17.5 centimeters (6.9 in) in height figurine that depicts a kneeling upright male figure who grasps a cylindrical object thought to be a rolled up sacred medicine bundle in his right hand and connected by the base there is a freestanding ceramic vessel placed in front of him.

It is the only Cahokian flint clay figurine with such a detached element not directly connected to the human figure of the piece.

This damage is thought to have happened when the figurine was "ritually killed" and deposited and not during its discovery during the plowing of the cotton field.

The pipe was discovered in a stone box grave at the Starr Village and Mound Group site in the Macoupin Creek Valley sometime late in the nineteenth century.

[8] A 17.8 centimeters (7.0 in) kneeling male figure pipe was excavated from the Twin Mounds Site in Ballard County, Kentucky.

Their analysis determined that the pipe was made from a cookeite-boehmite phosphate (CBP) flint clay from Missouri that may have come from a quarry as near to Cahokia as St. Louis County.

All of the figures show a general concentration of refinement on the heads and upper torsos, with some even going so far as to barely have the lower body represented at all.

They were found in Tennessee on a high bluff overlooking the Cumberland River and in 1799 sent to Jefferson by Morgan Brown, a lieutenant during the Revolutionary War.

Now in the Frank H. McClung Museum in Knoxville,[23] it has been used on numerous book and magazine covers as well as on a U.S. postage stamp as part of the Art of the American Indians series.

[24] A paired set of male and female sandstone statues was discovered in March 1895 at the Link Farm site at the confluence of the Duck and Buffalo Rivers south of Waverly in Humphreys County, Tennessee.

The statues were damaged when found, thought to have occurred during the hasty burial at a time of warfare or social upheaval.

Although the frequency of finds of this type drops dramatically outside of the geographical area for which they are named, significant examples have been found in other locations.

These two pieces are significant because the ethnographic history of the area records the use of stone temple statuary by the Natchez people, but these are the only known examples to have been found.

Two very rare large wooden versions have also been found and it is hypothesized that there may have been many more that have not survived burial in the acidic soils of North America.

[1] A unique cache of ceramic figurines was discovered in 1971 at the Brick Church Mound and Village Site in Nashville.