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Speaking with the Ancestors
Mississippian Stone Statuary of the Tennessee-Cumberland Region
By Kevin E. Smith James V. Miller THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2009 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8173-5465-7
Chapter One
Mississippian Stone Sculpture
In the courtyard of this palace, the Spaniards found two idols as large as a three-year-old, one male and one female. -Francisco de Chicora
When European explorers from England, France, and Spain began their initial forays into southeastern North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A.D., they encountered what they described as the "temples" or "shrines" of native peoples. Among the items decorating many of these shrines were "idols" in human form sculpted most frequently in wood but occasionally in pottery and stone. Some of the early chroniclers believed they were portraits of dead native kings and queens; others perceived them as statues of native gods (Figure 1.1). While interpretations of the meaning of these idols by early chroniclers may be questioned because of their biased perspectives toward indigenous worldviews, one thing they all agreed upon is that these shrines and idols were fascinating and important parts of native culture. As far as we know, none of these human shrine sculptureswere ever acquired by early explorers through trade or were seized as loot or plunder. We were unable to find any documents suggesting that shrine statues were carried back for display in the colonial centers of this New World or home cities back in the Old World. The idols were fascinating curiosities to write about, but had no real value to explorers in search of gold or land. Although recorded on several occasions in the 1500s and 1600s, human figural sculptures disappear from mention in the documentary record of southeastern native peoples by the early 1700s.
Less than a century later, however, farming colonists began to unearth stone images in human form as they tilled the fertile river valleys of the fledgling United States. Ranging in height from an inch or so to nearly three feet, these images of seated and kneeling humans excited the imagination of the public and scholars alike. The earlier historical records of "shrine statues" seem to have been forgotten, overlooked, or perhaps were simply unavailable as American scholars speculated about who might have created these mysterious human statues.
The earliest discovery of a stone image that we can document was by an anonymous farmer plowing his field along the Cumberland River southwest of Lexington, Kentucky, around July 1790 (Figure 1.2). Harry Innes, judge of the United States court for the district of Kentucky, sent the kneeling female image to Thomas Jefferson with his compliments on July 8, 1790. This nine-and-three-quarter-inch statue became the first of five pieces of Native American figural sculpture in Jefferson's Indian Hall at Monticello. In a letter to Innes, Jefferson admired the sculpture as "the best piece of workmanship I ever saw from their [Indian] hands" ( Jefferson 1791). Other distinguished visitors were less impressed. During his visit to Monticello in 1816, the Baron de Montlezun-Labarthette of France pronounced the statues in Jefferson's collection to have been created "by savages-very hideous" (Carrier and Moffatt 1944). We'll return to Jefferson and his statue collection later.
After this first discovery, additional stone images of humans were uncovered throughout the river valleys of the interior Southeast, more often than not by farmers. While Jefferson immediately assumed that ancestors of then contemporary Native Americans created his statues, later discoverers and antiquarians were to look further afield for their sculptors. In the first book-length treatise published on American antiquities, Caleb Atwater (1820) proclaimed with confidence that the creators of the statues were "Hindoos" from India. This first publication of the American Antiquarian Society included an illustration of another fine piece of stone sculpture that had been acquired by Winthrop Sargent from a local planter in Natchez, Mississippi (Figure 1.3; Williams 1991:37).
By 1820, several additional stone statues had been discovered in Tennessee-and they were soon to play a significant role in the debates about the prehistory of North America. In 1807, John Haywood moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to establish a law practice in "The Old Southwest." In 1816, after earning a reputation as one of the most eloquent and learned lawyers in Nashville, he was appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Perhaps because of his background as a legal scholar, Haywood also took on the task of writing the first history of the state of Tennessee (created only two decades earlier in 1796). In the absence of organized archives and libraries, he proceeded to create a local version of the American Antiquarian Society to assist in this task. By 1823, Haywood had accumulated sufficient information on the "antiquities of the Western Country" to produce his first volume, titled The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee up to the First Settlements Therein by the White People in the Year 1768. Leaning heavily on the works of Atwater and John Clifford (1820), Haywood presented the notion that "The Hindoo family has branched into the Egyptians, Celts, Goths, Peruvians, and Mexicans, whence came the builders of the mounds, and the worshippers of these images, which are found in Tennessee" (Haywood 1823:140-141). Haywood also included some other startling discoveries from Tennessee that would play an important role in the folklore of the shrine statues decades later; most significantly, he recounted the recent discovery (yet again in the momentous year of 1820) of a race of prehistoric pygmies that had formerly inhabited the landscape of Middle Tennessee.
Despite their rarity, more and more of the stone statues appeared throughout the 1800s as farms expanded and "digging" for antiquities emerged as a new hobby. The objects were of such broad interest that virtually every antiquarian felt compelled to mention them at least briefly in their publications. As time passed, widely divergent interpretations of the origins and meanings of the statues became increasingly common. Many writers found them fertile ground for speculative theories involving Toltecs, Aztecs, vanished races of White Mound Builders, Egyptians, Vikings, and yes, the Hindoos. Other writers followed Jefferson's lead in recognizing them as creations of the ancestors of native peoples, but shifted their focus to equally wild interpretations of the exotic pagan beliefs of "savage Indians." Their book sales were probably substantially better than the handful of scholars who continued simply to admire them as interesting but enigmatic creations of native peoples.
We return briefly to Thomas Jefferson's collection of five statues to illustrate the changing fortunes of the statues over time. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson thanked Morgan Brown, the donor of his second and third statues from the Cumberland River valley (this time from a few miles up the river in Tennessee) by stating: "such monuments of the state of the arts among the Indians are too singular not to be highly esteemed ... they will furnish new and strong proof how far the patience and perseverance of the Indian artist supplied with very limited means which he possessed" ( Jefferson 1800). After Jefferson's death, Dr. James T. Barclay purchased Monticello and presented what he described as a "collection of heathen images" found there to a Dr. Plummer of the Presbyterian Board of Missions. They were quickly but briefly relegated to the rooms of the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions in Boston. Their last known resting place was the Andover-Newton Seminary, which subsequently "lost track of them" (Kennedy 1994:223). In a single generation, these two statues had descended from "esteemed monuments" on display in a presidential home to "heathen idols" that may simply have been tossed quietly into a dustbin. In an early lament from his home in Hilham, Tennessee, Moses Fiske wrote that, "Valuable articles are lost by being found. The finest specimen of statuary, that I have heard of in the country, was knocked to pieces, to ascertain what sort of stone it was made of" (Fiske 1820). These types of stories are all too common for the statues discovered during the first half of the nineteenth century.
By the mid-1800s, however, the collecting of North American "relics" had become a much more common practice on the part of the wealthy elite at both local and national levels. For the first time since their initial recording by explorers over three centuries earlier, the statuary began to acquire a monetary value-their rarity made them eagerly sought after commodities. This new interest was positive in the sense that more of the statues survived their initial discovery and were more likely to be sold than smashed or consigned to the trash pile. At the same time, their status as collectibles also created a market demand for "Indian idols." As noted by W. S. Webb and D. L. DeJarnette, this demand "stimulated some who, having a little ability in stone cutting and more time than morals, decided to satisfy this demand by the manufacture of stone images from limestone, marble and a variety of stones which work well under hammer, chisel and file.... It is probable that of these artifacts there has been a greater percentage 'duplication for sale' than any other major artifact not even excluding pipes.... It was possible to see in many collections and in some museums stone images made from stones not ordinarily worked by the Indians and showing marks of steel chisels and marks of files" (1942:295). Some of these forgeries were more immediately obvious than others, but even the wildest forgeries were credible to a general public increasingly interested in "Fantastic Archaeology" (cf. Williams 1991). The story of King Crowley is a good case in point.
King Crowley was one of several stone effigies purportedly discovered in a cache near Jonesboro, Arkansas, about 1924 (Figure 1.4). According to the local tradition, Dentler Rowland, a gunsmith and jeweler, found the first of the statues by tripping over it on his property. Digging at the find spot, he discovered a small casket surrounded by other figures of people and animals about ten feet below the first statue. According to Johnson (2004), Bernice "Bernie" Babcock of Little Rock purchased them to place in the Arkansas Museum of Natural History that she had founded in MacArthur Park. She "named the largest piece 'King Crowley' in honor of Crowley's Ridge, the chief geographical feature in the area. His highness weighed in at about forty pounds, stood less than a foot high and his girth was about that, too" (Johnson 2004).
In the 1920s, archaeologists at the Smithsonian Institution examined some of the statues and reported that all of the pieces were obviously quite recent in origin. According to the catalog cards of the Arkansas State University Museum, which still houses a few of the pieces as Arkansas folk art, they included such obviously modern elements as brass furniture tacks for eyes and inset valentine hearts carved from agate. Some of the animal statues appear to represent monkeys, hippos, and camels.
Despite the arguments of the Smithsonian specialists to the contrary, some local historians remained convinced of their authenticity. In his history of Craighead County, Harry Lee Williams (1930) reported that "these images were made by the Aztecs and placed on Old Town Ridge and on the ridge below Jonesboro, as it is definitely established that the Aztecs once resided in what is now Missouri and Arkansas." Even today, the stories of King Crowley capture the imagination. The byline on a recent article about King Crowley in the Jonesboro Sun newspaper read, "It's a Hoax That Won't Go Away" (Hodges 2003). King Crowley is among the most obvious of the forgeries that emerged over the last century and a half, and yet still remains a powerful figure in local legends and folklore.
When we independently began investigating these "mysterious" stone statues in 1987, no comprehensive publication on them was to be found. A few years earlier, Thomas Emerson had completed a survey of Illinois stone images during which he discovered "that few of these items had ever been adequately described, discussed, or illustrated" (Emerson 1982:1). Myths and folklore published in local histories and newspapers like those surrounding King Crowley were far more accessible than any detailed information on the statues themselves. Eventually, our interest in Tennessee statues became a relatively comprehensive survey of similar stone statuary from throughout the prehistoric Southeast. While a significant number of the statuary can be viewed in museums throughout the eastern United States, detailed information on where they were found and how they eventually came to rest in their current homes is often difficult to find.
In the preceding, we have attempted to illustrate some of the difficulties encountered in our survey of stone statuary. The overwhelming majority of the statues were discovered by farmers plowing their fields or through the unsystematic "digging" of collectors and antiquarians during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For centuries, the majority of statues have been valued more as art objects than as artifacts. As a result, detailed archaeological contexts and associations are often difficult or even impossible to extract from the available literature. Many scholars of the nineteenth century were content simply to note the provenance by state or to the nearest modern community in their published works. In other instances, the details of discovery were sensationalized to sell newspapers, books, or the statues themselves, leading to conflicting and contradictory accounts. As a result, unfounded stories, deliberate falsehoods, and assumptions have gradually gained the weight of truth after decades of retelling.
Among the many difficulties inherent in reconstructing the stories of the statues is that they were sometimes perceived as heathen idols of little more than passing interest and at other times as rare art objects of exceptional value. As noted above, some statues have vanished because of the former, while the latter has created other problems. Once the statues were recognized as significant art objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them began to change hands rather frequently. Given their similarities in posture and other features, brief descriptions in auction catalogs provide few clues as to which specific statue was being sold, and documents recording the purchaser are rarer than the statues themselves. The statues (or casts) we were able to find are currently scattered in private and museum collections across the eastern United States. Like Jefferson's vanished statue pair, there are several others included in our survey that are probably still out there somewhere-perhaps this publication will bring some of them back to light.
The increasing value of the statues as art objects introduced yet another complication in our interpretation of the statues. While King Crowley and his entourage of sculptures were recognized as fakes almost immediately by professional archaeologists, other forgers were more skillful in creating their replicas. While some of these better forgeries have been exposed, others almost certainly have not. Whenever possible, we examined the statues for evidence that they were created with tools unavailable to prehistoric sculptors. In many cases, however, we were only able to examine casts or photographs that do not provide sufficient detail for determination. Even when examining original statues, the evidence is often equivocal. Along with the question of plow marks, their treatment after discovery has left scars, nicks, and marks that complicate interpretations of their authenticity. For most statues, we were unable to conduct the type of detailed examinations that might provide additional clues. In some instances, the timing of the discovery suggests the possibility of forgeries. For example, some statues made their appearance soon after the exhibition or publication of photographs of remarkably similar statues. In other cases, inconsistencies about the discovery or the presence of unique sculpted details presented similar uncertainties. Rather than impose our judgment about the relative authenticity of some statues, we have simply presented the information available to us. As a result, our survey includes an analysis of these fascinating objects, a history of their "lives" after discovery, and the folklore associated with some statues.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Speaking with the Ancestors by Kevin E. Smith James V. Miller Copyright © 2009 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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