Mississippian Shell-Tempered Loop-Handled Jar, Hiwassee Island

Native American, Mississippian culture, Southeastern Woodlands. A rounded, wide-mouthed jar hand-built from shell-tempered clay, its globular body swelling from a softly convex base to a slightly incurving rim. Two small loop handles rise from the shoulder, opposed across the vessel and pierced for suspension or lifting, with a further pair of low lug projections set between them. The surface is burnished and unslipped, ranging from warm terracotta orange across the upper body to smoky charcoal grays and blacks where reduction firing and hearth use darkened the walls. Coil-building marks and slight asymmetry remain visible, the honest evidence of a domestic pot made for cooking, storing, and serving. Vessels of this class dominate Mississippian household assemblages along the Tennessee River, where shell tempering allowed thin, thermally resilient walls suited to repeated heating. Shell tempering is the technological signature of the Mississippian world (roughly 1000 to 1550 CE): burned and crushed mussel shell mixed into the clay body reduced shrinkage and thermal stress, permitting potters to build thinner, lighter, more durable vessels than the grit- and sand-tempered wares of the preceding Woodland tradition. The loop-handled globular jar is the workhorse of that repertoire, appearing by the thousands in village middens and domestic contexts across the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi valleys. Hiwassee Island, at the confluence of the Hiwassee and Tennessee rivers in Meigs County, gave its name to the Hiwassee Island phase, defined during the Tennessee Valley Authority excavations of the 1930s directed by Thomas M. N. Lewis and Madeline Kneberg. Their published sequence remains a foundational chronology for the Mississippian occupation of eastern Tennessee, and ceramic types named there are still used to date sites across the region. Item # 202276

Estimate:£227.02

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