A Sunfish Effigy Waterbottle
There are reputedly over one hundred species of freshwater fishes in the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries. The American Indians during the Mississippian Period, circa AD 1000-1700, would certainly have eaten many if not all varieties of them. One of the classes that would have been consumed, because of they were so plentiful, is the sunfish.
The sunfish, so named because they are circular in shape and brightly colored like the sun, is a member of fish group more commonly known as freshwater panfish and are called that because they are flat and small enough to fit in a frying pan. These fish are usually no more than six inches in length but can grow to more than twelve inches long and weigh more than one pound. They are easy to catch using hook and bait and can also easily be captured, in shallow water, using bow and arrow or small spear. The natives would have caught these fish and eaten them and possibly used un-digestible parts for crop fertilizers. Supposedly the Indian named Squanto taught the Pilgrims in New England how to use fish for fertilizer in 1621 but that is probably just a fairy tale. Other early Europeans, though, made note of the occurrences of the natives using pulverized fish bones and uneatable parts for plant supplements.
The prehistoric and historic Indians had a belief in heaven and hell and they used the names Above World and Below World to describe them and they knew the earth as This World. All creatures, both real and mythological, lived in one of these realms. The people and animals such as deer and rabbits inhabited This World while birds and beneficial deities, such as Red Horn, lived in Above World. The Below World was inhabited by frogs and turtles and fish as well as powerful and spiteful creatures such as the Underwater Panther. And the Mississippian Indians made effigies of all these beings using clay dug from the river banks. Utilitarian jars and bottles and bowls were obviously made in massive quantities for everyday usage. After that came the symbolic animal/human vessels with fish effigies being the most plentiful.
Fish effigy vessels were probably made in large quantities because these water dwelling animals were a usable and easily captured source of dietary protein. Most fish likeness pots were made in the bowl and jar form and there were probably many thousands of them made during the seven hundred or so years that the Mississippian Culture existed. Occasionally, though, the early potters made vessels of the fish representation in the waterbottle shape. Some of these were very stylized while others were realistic images of these cold blooded boney vertebrates. Most of the bottle fishes were wider than tall with short to long necks projecting from the body side or back and they are normally in natural grey fired ceramics though some were colored with red or red and white paint slip.
This sunfish replica waterbottle was found on the Campbell Site, Pemiscot County, Missouri. The Campbell Site is in the southeastern part of the county near the Arkansas/Missouri boundary line and is considered to be Late Mississippian in time or AD 1400-1700. It is large site covering many acres and consisting of an earthen temple mound, ancient village complex and cemetery. It has produced the largest quantity of early Spanish artifacts of any site in southeastern Missouri which possibly means that the Hernando de Soto expedition visited the village in AD 1541. This fish vessel is in the rarer waterbottle form and, according to the type description, would actually be called a Campbell Applique Fish Effigy Bottle. This style definition includes the vessel being shell tempered and usually of Bell Plain burnished greyware as well as having thin strips of clay applied vertically from the vessel shoulder to the rim lip. These clay strips can be small and narrow or reasonably large and may or may not have notches. These pots, also, often have many small puntacted dimples poked into the neck probably with a small sharpened stick and all this work would have been done before the pot was fired. This symbolic fish bottle has realistically modeled head, tail and fins and is six and three-quarters inches tall by nine and one-eighth inches across the body from head to tail. The two and five-eighths inch tall neck, which extends from the side of the sunfish body, has three applied and notched strips and many tiny punctates. The entire solid vessel is well polished and since almost all Campbell Applique vessels date from about AD 1400 to 1700, it also was probably made in that time period. Pottery in this motif has been found in several sites in southeastern Missouri into northeastern Arkansas and across the big river into northwestern Tennessee. This is a relatively small area for production of a pottery style and it makes one question if whether all these ceramic utensils were made in a single town and traded to other regional villages. Few Campbell Applique vessels have been found intact or as collectors like to say – solid. In fact most pottery vessels from the Mississippian Period are found shattered from modern agricultural machinery, soil contraction and expansion or intentional/accidental breakage by the natives. Many collectors estimate that as much as eighty to ninety per cent of pottery vessels found are damaged in some manner. But luckily this vessel is solid and is in the rare bottle form. This is a vessel that a potter was probably proud to have made. This is a vessel that maybe anciently quenched the natives thirst. This is a vessel that showed reverence to a valuable food source. This is a vessel that is called a sunfish effigy waterbottle.
REFERENCES:
Chapman, Carl H. & Leo A. Anderson 1955
“The Campbell Site: A Late Mississippi Town Site and Cemetery in Southeast Missouri”,
MISSOURI ARCHAEOLOGIST, Vol. 17, Nos. 2 & 3
Hathcock, Roy
ANCIENT INDIAN POTTERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY
1976
Maus, Jim
“The Campbell Fish”, PREHISTORIC AMERICAN, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4
2000
Phillips, Phillip, James Ford & James Griffin
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI ALLUVIAL VALLEY, 1940-1947
1951