This Raven Harpoon Shaman Staff comes from Alaska, most likely the Tlingit nation. An intricate carving of an open-mouth raven with abalone eyes stares back at you through the display. This tool would have been carried by a clan shaman, aiding them in spiritual work. Visually this artifact is a stunning and well-preserved sample of cultural patrimony. Let’s take a brief look at some of its materials and use. Materials: This harpoon staff is made of lightweight, rot-resistant, long-living Western redcedar (thuja plicata). Found along the rainy coasts of the Pacific Northwest, homeland of ..read more

  It’s March, which here in Arkansas means it’s Archeology Month. To celebrate we are taking a look at one of our Spiro Mounds artifacts, this shell cameo pendant. Located in what is known today as the state of Oklahoma, far to the eastern edge, in the rich bottomlands of the Arkansas River sits the 150-acre archeological preservation site of Spiro Mounds. Once a thriving cultural hub, Spiro Mounds was home to an estimated 10,000 Caddoan-speaking people. These Mississippian period (800-1450 CE) “…people created a sophisticated culture which influenced the entire Southeast. Artifacts indic ..read more

  These buffalo hide scrapers, made of elk horn and metal, were used to clean buffalo hides. Processing buffalo hide, often a woman's job, included stretching the hide and then using the scraper to remove fat and flesh. If the hides were not cleaned properly, they could rot and spoil. Scraping also acts to make the hide thinner, lighter, and more manageable. The hide would then be tanned, which creates a soft, supple finish. The largest terrestrial animal in North America, the American bison, also commonly referred to simply as buffalo, supplied native nations with an abundance of resourc ..read more

  Today we are highlighting a quartz discoidal that was recovered in Blytheville, Arkansas. This lithic is classified as an apple discoidal due to the shallow indentions present on both faces (Stein, “Discoidals”). Apple discoidals are considered a rare variant because they are regionally restricted to southern Missouri and northern Arkansas (Stein, “Discoidals”). Discoidals such as this were made by using a hammerstone to shape the disk. Sand was then used to polish the stone and remove any imperfections. While discoidals range in size by a few inches, they are sized to fit within the pa ..read more

  These intricately crafted leg bands are a beautiful example of porcupine quillwork, an art form unique to the Americas. Practiced by Indigenous women for hundreds of years before European arrival, quillwork was used to decorate clothing, pouches, and jewelry. Though these leg bands were crafted by the hands of Plains Tribes, the porcupine spans a large geographic region, making quillwork a popular art from with many Native Nations across the Americas. The process starts with removing the nearly 30,000 quills from a porcupine hide. Next the quills were sorted, softened, and flattened. So ..read more

  The buckskin dress that an Apache girl dons during her ceremonial initiation into womanhood is an important part of her ritual transformation and the community's overall way of life. The feasts commemorating a girl's transition into a woman are the focal point of ceremonial gatherings for the Apache population, which is spread across Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The girl spends a year studying Apache culture, practicing meditation and prayer, and preparing for feasts with her family and ceremonial sponsors. At the end of this year-long process, they have a four-day ceremony that t ..read more

  The blade is made from a steel file that could have been acquired from a Russian or Spanish merchant ship. The file has been altered with hand-forged “blood groove” fluting and a domed pommel. The grooves are filled with red ochre. The dagger is thought to be from the Tlingit tribe off the coast of Alaska. The Tlingit people had three tiers of kinship structure in their traditional civilization. Each person belonged to one of the two moieties, the biggest kin groups. Every moiety consisted of multiple clans, each clan's members attributing their genesis to a shared mythical progenitor ..read more

  Native Americans received glass and ceramic beads as gifts from the early European explorers and colonists and traded them with them. Long before European settlers came to North America, Native Americans had been crafting beads out of bone, shell, and stone, and they still did after European contact. However, Native Americans developed a liking for European glass beads, primarily from Venice, with a small amount from Holland, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Early on, Europeans saw the value of beads to Native Americans. Businesses like the Hudson Bay Trading Company established profitab ..read more

  This monolithic axe was found in Tennessee and was carved from one stone. Recovered along the Mosquito Coast, these axes were kept in the Gothenburg Museum in Germany, according to Steven Loven (Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies, first published in Germany in 1924 and republished in 2010). According to Loven, the idea of the axe as a solid stone form should take precedence over the shapes of the axe, which are established by the different blade forms and hafting techniques of individuals who manufactured it. He continued his talk by bringing up a rather sizeable monolithic axe ..read more

  This pipe was found in Fairfield County, Ohio. The face has a “Weeping Eye“ motif, representing a falcon or another bird of prey. Modern academics have named the region's stylistic similarities among Mississippian artifacts, iconography, ceremonies, and mythology the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or S.E.C.C. From 1200 to 1650 CE, it corresponded with their adoption of complex social organization at the chiefdom level and maize agriculture. Scholars from the late 1800s to mid-1900s suspected there was a connection between S.E.C.C. and contemporary Mesoamerican cultures because of cert ..read more