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8 An Assessment of Moundville Engraved “Cult” Designs from Potsherds Vernon James Knight, Jr. When Clarence Moore published the first portfolios of Moundville art in 1905 and 1907, he drew attention to the numerous engraved pottery vessels from burials as sources of representational designs. Other major centers of Mississippian cultic art, Etowah, Lake Jackson, and Spiro, share much on a thematic level but lack Moundville’s strong emphasis on the medium of engraved pottery. Approximately 150 whole or restorable Mississippian pottery vessels with engraved representational designs are on record from the Black Warrior Valley, most residing either in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian or in the Alabama Museum of Natural History (Steponaitis 1983). Despite the size of the corpus, only a fraction has been published (e.g., Fundaburke and Foreman 1957; Futato and Knight 1986; Mellown 1976; Moore 1905a, 1907; Steponaitis 1983). Unlike the attention historically paid to Mississippian shell gorgets, shell cups, and statuary, this pottery has attracted virtually no systematic study as art. Waring and Holder (1945), in their classic formulation of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, excluded engraved art on pottery from their catalog of ritual objects, although they did attend to Moundville engraved designs in their study of the motifs and “god-animal representations” belonging to the complex. Subsequently both Steve Wimberly (1954, 1956) and Douglas McKenzie (1964) used Moundville engraved pottery to evaluate Moundville’s specific contribution to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex as that concept was envisioned by Waring and Holder. McKenzie also made observations regarding the mutual association of motifs at the Moundville site. But it was Steponaitis (1983:58–63, 129, 345–346, 349–350) who gave us the most useful listing to date, cross-indexing a roster of 22 specific representational motifs with Moundville vessels seriated by subphase. And it was Steponaitis (1983:317–318) who gave this pottery a name: Moundville Engraved, var. Hemphill. In regard to comparative stylistic and iconographic dimensions of this art, Phillips and Brown (1978) presented a few help- 152 Knight ful but tentative impressions based upon the imagery published in Moore’s volumes . In the past several years, taking our inspiration from Phillips and Brown’s masterful work with Spiro shell engraving, we have slowly begun to expand our understandings of style and iconography at Moundville (Gillies 1998; Lacefield 1995; Schatte 1997, 1998). Themes The main point of this chapter is to suggest the value of Moundville Engraved, var. Hemphill potsherds as sources of stylistic, iconographic, and chronological information in addition to the corpus of whole vessels. First I think it is necessary to outline a classification of the Hemphill designs by their thematic content and to comment on some of the possibilities and problems involved in trying to identify the designs using potsherds. I use the term theme to refer to conventional subject matter at the level of the composition. Given this usage, we may begin with what I believe to be an important point, namely, that the important themes in Hemphill art are very few in number. Close to 90 percent of the known designs are variations on only five themes: the winged serpent, the crested bird, the raptor , center symbols and bands, and trophies. Let us begin with the three zoomorphic supernaturals. Winged Serpent Moundville winged serpents have U-shaped serpent bodies with upturned heads that are antlered, plumed, or bare (Figure 8.1). One wing is shown in side view. The wing has an anterior wing bar decorated with concentric circles, distinguished from rearward trailing feathers that usually do not overlap and that are decorated with concentric semicircles. Optional wing features include a vertical crosshatched bar and covert feathers shown behind the anterior wing bar. Because of the relative complexity of the design, winged serpent sherds are rather easily recognized . Sherds are commonly found with portions of snake bodies and, on occasion , a head or a rattle. However, the most frequently recognizable elements on sherds are wing components: feathers and/or portions of the anterior wing bar. Unfortunately, sherds that show only wing components present an important problem. Whole vessels in the collections that show the raptor theme with its wings in profile share virtually the same wing form as the more common winged serpent. Until we possess a better understanding of the stylistic and iconographic dimensions of the raptor theme, we are not in a position to distinguish serpent from raptor by wing form alone. We are therefore forced to code sherds...

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