THE MICKEY MOUSE SHELL GORGETS
M – I – C - - - K – E – Y M – O – U – S – E ! I can still hear the famous tune with those letters resonating in my head. Walt Disney started his iconic television club show in 1955 and this old man (me-not Disney) was not even a teenager at that time. But I tuned in regularly, as did probably millions of other pre-teen and teenage boys, to watch the show and especially the buxom raven hair beauty, Annette Funicello, with her big and round – er – uh - arg ---- Mickey Mouse ears. But only a few hundred years prior to that time, some American natives in the southern mountains created their own version of the club emblem with their Mickey Mouse shell gorgets.
The South Appalachian Mississippian Culture, which was a politically centralized and socially elite polity, covered the area including the spine and much of the bordering region of the southern mountain range bearing its name. There were most likely many individual chiefdoms living in and controlling sections of these mountains ranging from current southwestern Virginia through western North Carolina and northwestern South Carolina into northern Georgia and Alabama and throughout eastern Tennessee. With agricultural crops, centering on corn and fertile land, being a major focus of all these groups, there was apparently much interacting and occasionally even warfare between these groups. The social interactions probably included ceremonial corn festivals utilizing various forms of artistic imagery created by the natives using natural materials acquired locally and through long distance trade. These people certainly made and used both simple utilitarian as well as stylistic pottery vessels along with what we, today, would call prestige goods such as shell, clay and bird bone beads, mica ornaments, shell ear pins, ceramic nose and lip plugs or labrets, copper breast plates and marine shell gorgets. They probably also made many of these ornaments using local woods which have not withstood the ravages of time in the acidic regional soils. The shell gorgets were made in several styles including rattlesnake engravings, face mask effigies and cribbed designs. These odd crib styles look like four straight or slightly curved logs laid out in a square motif such as would be seen if one looked down upon a topless log cabin or corn crib. Or maybe they look like mouse ears.
Close to the small town of Swannanoa and near the banks of the Swannanoa River in mountainous Buncombe County, North Carolina, is a college by the name of Warren Wilson. In the 1940’s an old Indian village next to the river was discovered and later in the 1960’s it was archaeologically investigated. This ancient town, now known as the Warren Wilson site since it is a portion of the college campus, was the home to a group of natives who are acknowledged as being a part of the Pisgah Phase of the South Appalachian Mississippian Culture, even though we have no idea just what they actually called themselves. The heart area of this Pisgah Phase cultural entity was the rugged crest of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Unaka Range that envelopes the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The several hundred known Pisgah Phase village sites sprang out in all directions from this mountainous range. The actual word Pisgah comes from the biblical Mount Pisgah north of the Dead Sea in the Holy Land and from the five hundred thousand plus acres of the Pisgah National Forest in western NC. These Pisgah Phase people lived in their mountainous homes from about AD 1000 to about AD 1500 and their large territory extended from east of the Warren Wilson site as far west as current Knox County, TN, as far south as Oconee County, SC and as far north as Lee County, VA. On these lands they built their palisaded and open plaza villages, some of which featured large earthen temple mounds. And there they raised their families, worshipped their deities, buried their dead and grew their corn, beans and squash along the alluvial river bottoms and hidden mountain valleys. These natives, who were most likely also associated with the more southerly Lamar Culture, were probably quite content in their hilly environment until the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century AD. Whether by internal unrest concerning their arcane societal beliefs or by disease and greed brought on by the Europeans or by a combination of both, the Pisgah Phase life style ceased to exist by name and by religious/economic credence shortly after AD 1500. The native’s existence, though, did continue within another group that archaeologists call the Qualla Phase but that is known to many Americans by another name - Cherokee. But before their social communities ceased to exist, the Pisgah Indians made pottery and ornaments including the curious shell gorget that is officially named the Warren Wilson style but is called by many collectors the Mickey Mouse gorget.
The manufacture of shell gorgets has been covered in other texts, so you will be herein spared the details of just how they were made. Each group in the overall Mississippian Cultural society had its own style of shell jewelry. The Warren Wilson motif would basically fall into the style that has many names including square cross or looped square or crib or quadrilobed. They are shell ornaments that are in a circular or square shape with four rounded external projections that look similar to the cartoon mouse’s ears – thus their colloquial name. Some are unadorned with no type of decoration, while others were engraved with one or two lines near the edges and these often show one or more engraved circles or loops within the rounded corners. Certain ones include drilled pits in the ear loops and a pit or depression in the center of the gorget and a few include an engraved square, circle or cross in the center of the ornament surrounding a drilled pit or pierced hole. They usually, but not always, have two suspension holes near one edge and that often show usage wear marks from being on a thong around a persons neck but a few show no evidence of being worn and possibly were intentionally made to be interred with deceased society members. These gorgets are normally small being only in the one to two inch round/square sizes which makes them among the smallest of all the gorget types. Their manufacture dates to the AD 1300-1500 time frame which easily fits into the cultural cycle of the Pisgah Phase people. These ornaments had some definite relationship to the circular Lick Creek style rattlesnake engraved shell gorgets since several Lick Creek type adornments were excavated during the work at the Warren Wilson Site but as of this time there is no answer as to what this relationship was. The Lick Creek engraving style is normally found in modern Tennessee north of the Knoxville which is in the extreme western edge of the Pisgah natives land and is dated to the Pisgah Phase time frame of AD 1300 to AD 1500. Of course that leads to the unanswerable question of why shell gorgets normally found in central Tennessee would be discovered so far east in Buncombe County, NC. These Warren Wilson ornaments also have a likely connection to the bird effigy gorgets called Cox Mound that have been found mostly in Alabama and Tennessee. The Cox Mound shell decorations usually have an engraved looped square which is essentially identical to the exterior shape of the Warren Wilson types. This leads to another question of just what is the commonality between these two gorget types that were made so many miles apart. And again we have no answer. Like all shell gorgets, the Mickey Mouse ones are not common and they are much rarer than many other shell ornament types. These artifacts will definitely fit into the artifact group known as “do not know just how few were actually made” but a reasonable estimate would be around one hundred based on the known quantity that has been found. But whether fewer than or more than a hundred were made by the amerinds, these shell ornaments remain a definite curiosity. The common mouse was not an animal existing in America five hundred plus years ago – they came to this continent as unwanted ship stowaways along with the European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they then colonized the entire land. Since these rodents did not exist here during the Pisgah Phase time, the natives would not have had them or their exaggerated ears as a gorget fabrication stimulus. We shall probably never know what influenced one or more craftsmen to make these unusual shell ornaments but we can be sure it was not Annette Funicello and her big and round – er – uh – arg - - - I probably should not go there again. I shall simply end with the statement that the Pisgah Phase natives, for whatever reasons and from whatever inspirations, made and used these very rare and odd Warren Wilson style ornaments that we now often call the Mickey Mouse shell gorgets.
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