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

Chapter Ten. The Raptor on the Path by George E. Lankford

moundville 240 chapter 10 The Raptor on the Path George E. Lankford Several frequently encountered images from Mississippian iconography are illustrations drawn from the widespread mythology of the progress of the soul after death. That argument has been presented in earlier articles on the “Path of Souls” and the “Great Serpent,” in which the familiar images of the winged serpent, the hand-and-eye, the skull, and the bone were identified as elements of the celestial journey taken by the free soul after death (Lankford 2004, 2007a, b). The focus of those studies was the ceramic collection at Moundville, where those particular images from the larger iconographic corpus are found clustered on pottery included in mortuary contexts. Their co-occurrence on bottles and their separation from other images helped identify them as participants in a single area of meaning, at least at Moundville. One other image shares space on a bottle in the Path of Souls cluster: a bird. This figure has been mentioned in the earlier articles but has been reserved for further consideration here, because of some thought-provoking implications of its presence in the iconic group. Thus, while this chapter should be considered an extension of the Path of Souls articles, it will assess the appearance of the raptorial bird at Moundville and some possible lessons in iconographic reasoning that may be drawn from it. First of all, it should be pointed out that the birds in the iconographic corpus may be of many types. Significant intellectual energy has been spent over the last century in attempting to identify species of various images, an attempt based upon the dual assumption that the images are naturalistic representations and that species identification would permit understanding of the artists’ intentions. There has been little agreement on the identifications and even less success in capturing the symbolic dimension via that approach. Part of the problem is the difficulty in measuring both the range of variability permitted within a single artist’s work and the variation in representation of the raptor on the path 241 the same image, in terms of content, across time and space by different artists . The result is that there is no agreement on how many different birds are depicted in the Mississippian iconographic corpus. If apparently similar images are examined together to create a serial display of alternate artistic possibilities, then some of the key identifying features of the figure may emerge. An example of this problem was discussed in an earlier examination of the “Crested Bird” (Lankford 2007d). In that study of engraved shell gorgets from the Tennessee Valley region, the two features that seem to be crucial are the feather crest on the head and the straight bill (Fig. 10.1a–d). Since it seemed advisable to avoid prejudicing the interpretation of the figure by linkage to naturalistic identification, the bird was simply dubbed “Crested Bird.” The isolation of the two key identifiers then made it possible to recognize the figure when it appeared in quite different artistic renderings, as happens when the composition changes or when the figure is drawn by a different artist. Use of key identifiers in iconography also makes it possible to assess the breadth of artistic freedom permitted in the creation of these designs. Further, key identifiers permit the researcher to assign images to a separate category, in this case the Crested Bird. The bird on the Moundville pottery collection is not the Crested Bird, as will be seen, and similar iconic a b c d e f g figure 10.1. (a–d) Four examples of the “Crested Bird,” two from Tennessee shell gorgets and two from Moundville ceramics, showing a range of artistic renderings (after Moore 1905:Fig. 113 and Moore 1907:Fig. 38); (e, f) a Crested Bird and a Raptor, both from Moundville ceramics (after Moore 1905:Fig. 9 and Moore 1907:Fig. 7); (g) Raptor and Hand-and-Eye on a Moundville pot (Moore 1907:Fig. 9). moundville 242 identification processes may reveal the same sorts of artistic freedom in the treatment of the Moundville bird. A comparison of the Crested Bird and one of the fairly typical renderings of the Moundville bird permits quick separation of the two (Fig. 10.1e, f). The key characteristics, at least in distinguishing these two birds from each other, are the jagged feather crest and the hooked beak. The resemblance to the naturalistic class of raptorial...