Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World

Chapter Nine. A Redefinition of the Hemphill Style in Mississippian Art by Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Vincas P. Steponaitis

a redefinition of the hemphill style 201 chapter 9 A Redefinition of the Hemphill Style in Mississippian Art Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Vincas P. Steponaitis Moundville has long been central to discussions of the Mississippian artistic florescence. Together with Etowah and Spiro, Moundville was once routinely included as one of the “big three” primary centers contributing to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a concept that emphasized unity in Mississippian art and belief. In recent years, though, as individual site histories have come into sharper focus, contrasts rather than commonalities in art and religious expression among major Mississippian centers have moved to center stage. Following on the critique first suggested decades ago by Alex Krieger (1945), 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. The foundation of recent progress along these lines has been an attempt to define these regional styles more explicitly (Brown 1989, 2007c; Muller 1989; Phillips and Brown 1978, 1984). Definitions Let us be clear about what we mean by a “style.” For us, these are purely formal units expressing fixed conventions of design and execution (see Phillips and Brown 1978). 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. In defining styles, we also think it is important to specify a scale that allows the formation of like units in space and time. Specifically, we advocate style definitions that reflect communities of closely interacting artists on a very limited geographic scale. As formal moundville 202 units, styles can be and should be defined independently of considerations of iconographic meaning. In fact, we are convinced that the understanding of style is prerequisite to any comprehension of iconography. We stress the methodological importance of defining geographically localized styles, because these style units contribute to the solving of puzzles associated with major sites. 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 (Brown 1996, 2004). 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. Removing the “noise” of nonlocal goods results in a much more coherent corpus of images, tied to local circumstances in ways we are beginning to understand. The stylistic distinctiveness of Moundville engraved art on pottery in relation to the broader compass of Mississippian art was recognized in a number of comments made in the 1970s by Philip Phillips and James Brown (1978). But the name “Hemphill” as applied to Moundville art has its roots in a pottery type and variety, Moundville Engraved, var. Hemphill, originally defined to include burnished pottery bearing representational images (Steponaitis 1983). Subsequent exploration of the stylistic coherence of these images on engraved pottery in a series of master’s theses written in the 1990s at the a b c figure 9.1. Hemphill-style skulls in different media: (a) from a stone palette, the Willoughby Disk; (b–c) from an engraved ceramic bottle. (Vessel numbers: b–c, NR9/M5. Collections: a, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University [PMAE]; b–c, National Museum of the American Indian [NMAI]. Images: a–c, after Moore 1905:Figs. 5, 147. Moundville vessel numbers follow the conventions described in Steponaitis 1983:11–13.) a redefinition of the hemphill style 203 University of Alabama by Hyla Lacefield (1995), Kevin Schatte (1997), and Judith Gillies (1998) led to the formal definition of a Hemphill style (Brown 2004; Steponaitis and Knight 2004). In this chapter we suggest an expansion of the Hemphill style concept beyond engraved pottery to incorporate other media, including images on incised and painted pottery as well as certain images on copper, stone, and shell artifacts. We were moved to do this as we examined stylistic cross-ties among various locally crafted goods at Moundville . Broadening the concept to include these other media is parallel to what has already been done...