The Holly Bluff style

ABSTRACT

We recognize a new style of Mississippian-period art in the North American Southeast, calling it Holly Bluff. It is a two-dimensional style of representational art that appears solely on containers: marine shell cups and ceramic vessels. Iconographically, the style focuses on the depiction of zoomorphic supernatural powers of the Beneath World. Seriating the known corpus of images allows us to characterize three successive style phases, Holly Bluff I, II, and III. Using limited data, we source the style to the northern portion of the lower Mississippi Valley.

KEYWORDS:

• Style
• iconography
• Mississippian
• shell cups
• multidimensional scaling

Acknowledgments

Robert Sharp, John Scarry, and Jera Davis participated in our Holly Bluff workshop discussions; we are grateful for their ideas and enthusiasm. As is obvious from the citations, this paper has its foundation in the magisterial stylistic study of engraved shell at Spiro by Philip Phillips and James A. Brown (1975–1982). We are indebted to Jim Brown for his positive and constructive commentary as these ideas initially took shape in 2007, in the setting of the annual Mississippian Iconographic Workshop convened by Kent Reilly. The student assistants who energetically contributed to our workshop group during these discussions were Michael Anstice, Alex Corsi, Nathan Heep, Will Pratt, and Luis Rodriguez. We thank Melissa Bucher (Director, C. H. Nash Museum, University of Memphis) for permission to photograph the Chucalissa bottle. We also thank Keith Stephenson, Adam King, and Karen Smith, who generously shared their data from research in progress on the Hollywood site in Georgia. Three anonymous reviewers contributed thoughtful comments that have strengthened the paper.

Data availability statement

The variable list used in the MDS analysis and the fully coded data for the objects in Table 1 may be had upon request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Vernon James Knight is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology and Curator Emeritus in American Archaeology at the University of Alabama. His research interests lie in social structure, political organization, and artistic style and iconography of the eastern United States and the Greater Antilles.

George E. Lankford is Professor Emeritus in Folklore from Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas. His research interests are in Mississippian iconography and its relation to Native American mythology.

Erin Phillips is Regional Laboratories Manager at Coastal Environments, Inc. in Houston, Texas. Her research interests are in the archaeology of complex societies in the southeastern United States, and in art in archaeological contexts.

David H. Dye is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Memphis. His research interests include Mississippian ceramic analysis, conflict studies, and belief systems.

Vincas P. Steponaitis is Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the precolonial and colonial Indian cultures of the American South, the origins of political centralization, studies of ancient art, and the analysis of ancient ceramics.

Mitchell R. Childress is an independent researcher living in Memphis, Tennessee. His archaeological work has focused on sites in the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi drainages. His primary research interests are anthropological archaeology, population dynamics, quantitative methods, and art history.

ORCID

Vernon James Knight http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0791-000X

Erin Phillips http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4789-959X

David H. Dye http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0338-8982

Vincas P. Steponaitis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0000-3979

Mitchell R. Childress http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6419-6258

Notes

1 By centering, we refer to compositions arranged to embody a focal point that serves as a symbol of the center. Such embodied compositions imply that local centers can be created ritually, and that some things, substances, or persons need to be “centered.” See Knight and Steponaitis (2011:219).

2 We admit to the possibility of circular reasoning here, in that the exercise began by extracting the “serpent” material from Phillips and Brown’s (1975–1982) Braden B presentation.

3 Phillips and Brown (1975–1982:2:Plate 24) called this same creature an “amphisbaena,” a mythical double-headed snake, choosing to place emphasis on both its double-headed nature and its intertwined articulation in a specific knot, the double carrick bend. As many depictions of what we think is the same creature exhibit neither of these criteria, we have taken the liberty of re-naming it.

4 The bulb and downward hook at the end of the bill is best illustrated by Phillips and Brown in a design not shown here (1975–1982:2:Plate 29), and by P&B 31 B, our Figure 6a.

5 We substitute here our own reconstruction from the published rubbings (Phillips and Brown 1975–1982:3:Plate 73). In the original, at least two of the cup fragments (“d” and “f”) seem misplaced. We have rotated fragment “d” 180 degrees and moved it upward on the cup so as to avoid merging two different snake bodies and two different dorsal fins. Likewise, we have moved fragment “f” to a position closer to the spire, avoiding the conflation of a free-floating trilobate motif with another one decorating a dorsal fin. Although our reconstruction may not be entirely accurate either, it creates a more satisfactory solution to a highly fragmented specimen.

6 The MDS solution shown here does not include a number of items shown in Table 1 that were added to the corpus after the quantitative analysis was completed and the stylistic groups were identified. These are P&B 27.1, 32, 33, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93, B-6 A, MAG, BOW, NE63, and HWD 2. The solution also shows a design (Phillips and Brown 1975–1982:5:Plate 227) that has since been deleted (see note 7).

7 These deletions included the Issaquena Disk (Brown 1926:228–231), a sandstone palette believed to come from the Grace site, Issaquena County, Mississippi. That deletion, importantly, leaves the style entirely confined to containers. Also deleted was the Perino Piasa (Perino 1960), an image from an engraved ceramic bottle from the Pecan Point site, Arkansas, and Spiro cups 226 D and 227, which we are now convinced are correctly assigned to the Craig B style phase.

8 These cognate examples are P&B 8, likewise assigned by us to Holly Bluff II, P&B 33, assigned by us to Holly Bluff I, and two designs assigned to the Craig B style phase by Phillips and Brown (1975–1982:5:Plates 226 D, 227).

9 It is this unusual combination of the early crosshatched shield dorsal element with such late traits as snake heads, rattles, and forked tongues that forces the Chucalissa image into its outlier position on the MDS plot (Figure 3), positioned directly between the main Holly Bluff I and Holly Bluff III image clusters.

10 Keith Stephenson (personal communication 2012) informs us that the catalog numbers published for these vessels by Thomas (1894) are incorrect. The correct numbers are A135196 (the illustrated vessel) and A135204.

11 Although the Chucalissa bottle has a rare shape for the Memphis area in which it was found, there are at least two other vessels from that area that have that shape. At this point we consider it more likely locally made than an import.

12 The concept of intertwined snakes artistically enwrapping the containers on which they are put is not unique to Holly Bluff in the Mississippian world. Published examples of the concept in other styles include a painted bottle from northeast Arkansas, and a Caddoan bottle, also from Arkansas (Townsend and Sharp 2004:216, Figure 18; 248, Figure 3).

13 At least the panther-raptor-snakes in Holly Bluff would be called “piasas” in the usage of Phillips and Brown (1975–1982). We have, however, decided to avoid this term because of an uncomfortable vagueness about the way it has been used elsewhere to refer to any number of composite creatures.

14 This multiplicity of Beneath World powers finds a comparable expression in the contemporaneous Bellaire style of the Plaquemine archaeological culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, there confined to smoking pipes. Bellaire artisans had a different vision of Beneath World spirits: long-tailed panthers, panther-raptor-serpents, and owl-fish-serpents (Steponaitis et al. 2009).

15 We are aware that the depiction of rattles on snakes in this art may be less a direct reference to the genus Crotalus than an allusion to the shaman-like possession by these creatures of gourd rattles (Hamell and Fox 2005).