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collins wrote: Symbolism in art tends to have various meaning and can depend upon the culture utilizing them. In this case we are dealing with Southeastern Siouans. Native American symbolism in art has had many books written on the topic. If you take each symbol and seperate them out you can do look ups on them and discover what they could have meant or what was most probable. In the end they mean what the artists or culture wants them to mean or what they understand them to mean. These symbols from what I have seen or read about tend to be pretty basic and common symbols among various tribes, but especially Siouans. Usually jagged lightening like symbols depict the thunderbeings or the power of nature especially the air and fire. It can represent life energy. It can also be used to depict a person or animals connection to that power and thus their status and how they are viewed in that particular culture. Some symbols or marking can represent calendric cycles of time or seasons. Some can represent relationship to how a community was stratified. Most swastica or whirlewind symbols mean movement and motion. Sometimes this could be representive of fire, migration, spiritual growth, or, for the real far out, a portal to the other side or another world. It is possible that the V shaped markings represented people or houses which would tend to indicate a communal stratification and the whirlwind could be a representation of the central fire.
If you look through some Native American beading books you will notice some Siouan designs that are strikingly similar. Look to their meanings as a reference, but also understand that the environment that a tribe lived in determined much of their understanding of the world be it spiritual or physical. Another take on it would be a sun symbol as the sun was revered for bringing life and for purification.
Perhaps Ed or Linda could explain it better.
Here are some of my thoughts on it from way back when.
Them two black and white shells was actually found not that far from Occaneechi town….they was found in Tennesse at the Cox mound.
The Cox Mound, or Woodpecker, gorget style is a particularly beautiful and enduring symbol of Tennessee’s prehistoric inhabitants. A gorget was a pendant, or personal adornment, worn around the neck as a badge of rank or insignia of status and was thought to be symbolic of both earthly and supernatural powers. A variety of gorget styles, or designs, are known. As a class of artistic expression, this type of artifact falls within the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, formerly known as the Southern Cult.
Just over thirty Cox Mound-style gorgets have been found since the late nineteenth century, primarily from prehistoric Mississippian stone box graves and villages along the lower Tennessee, Cumberland, Duck, Harpeth, and Buffalo Rivers of Middle Tennessee, and the middle Tennessee River valley of northern Alabama. As a result of the frequent mortuary association of Cox Mound gorgets with certain pottery types, namely Matthews Incised, as well as other artifacts, it has been postulated that Cox Mound gorgets date to the period A.D. 1250-1450. One rich grave from the famous burial mound at the Castalian Springs site in Sumner County produced two Cox Mound gorgets.
Typically, Cox Mound gorgets were manufactured on exotic marine shell and were white in color. Other materials, such as black slate in Putnam County and human skull fragments in Hardin County, were used rarely. Engraving the intricate design on the hard shell or slate without metal tools took many hours of skilled labor and is thought to have been a winter activity.
The Native tribe that belonged to the Cox mound was the Yuchi which called themselfs the children of the sun….it is said they was also Siouan.
The Yuchi Indians are a North American Indian tribe belonging to the Southeastern Indian cultural group. Ethnohistorians indicate that during the historic period there were three principal bands of Yuchi: one on the Tennessee River, one in west Florida, and one on the Savannah River. The last of these relocated to the Chattahoochee River around 1715 and became part of the Creek Confederacy. The combined populations of all three groups probably never exceeded 3,000-5,000 persons. Unfortunately, frequent changes in location and confusion over the names applied to the tribe limits information regarding their inhabitancy of Tennessee.
The most outstanding hallmark of the Yuchis is their language, Uchean, which is distinct from all other Native American languages. While a linguistic isolate, Uchean does bear some structural resemblances to the Muskhogean and Siouan linguistic families and has occasionally been misclassified as Algonquian. Because Uchean was a difficult language to speak, most early historical sources refer to the Yuchis using a variety of non-Uchean names, including Hogologue, Tahogale, Chiska, Westo, Rickohockan, and Tamahaita.
The Yuchis referred to themselves as Tsoyahá, meaning “children of the sun.” The term Yuchi probably derives from a reply yú tcí, meaning “at a distance / sitting down,” to a standard southeastern Indian salutation: “Where do you come from?”
The earliest mention of Yuchis in Tennessee is found in the Spanish de Soto expedition narratives (1539-43), where they are referred to as the Chisca and located in the highlands north of the Tennessee River. The Chisca are mentioned again by the Spaniard Juan Pardo’s expedition (1566-67), where they are described as warlike mountain chiefs. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Yuchis split into two groups, with one body remaining in the north and the other radiating across the southern lowlands. Interestingly, the Yuchis have an oral tradition which explains the division of the tribe, in which one group, “Trackmaster’s children,” remained in the original homeland, while the children of “A bear only” moved toward the southern sun.
In 1673 one band of Yuchis reportedly lived in a stockaded or fortified town somewhere along the headwaters of the Tennessee River, possibly on the French Broad River near the confluence with the Holston River. Two English Virginian traders, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, visited this group, which they referred to as the Tomahittans, on an overland trading mission supported by Abraham Wood. Needham returned to Petersburg, Virginia, with some Tomahittans to formalize trade relations with Wood, while Arthur remained in the town and accompanied some warriors on a retaliatory raid against Spanish settlements in Florida around 1674.
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=Y006
Linda wrote: There’s a museum reproduction at the Occoneechee State Park museum of a necklace with a shell with this design worked into it:
This is the design that was found at Gaston [correction Hillsborough] , is attritubed to the Occoneechee, and therefore, perhaps the closest piece of artwork to the ancestry we’re trying to honor. I’ll try to get a photo of it on the shell. It really looks very nice.
I was contacted today by a shell jewelry maker. I’ve asked him what kind of price he could give us for a quanity of them.
Has there been any findings as to the meaning of the symbols on this gorget?
Shirley
It’s not Saponi, Manahoac, or Monacan.
The design in the center is the tribal emblem of another Siouan speaking tribe.
The Virginia Siouans had 3 arrows in the center of theirs.
Here is a added bonus for you…..a reconstructed Monacan man and woman….actual monacan skulls was used for this recreation.
One more bonus for you.
Every single Mound in Virginia….these are Monacan and Manahoac mounds…….Blue dots show the mound locations.
The replica I wear of the whirlwind gorget was made by Grady Smith at http://www.creekcarver.com/. He told me that from what he knows of Creek culture, the outer band of triangles would represent the forest, the inner band would represent the village and the whirlwind in the center would represent the Master of the Universe breathing life into the world. Whether or not this intepretation would hold for the Saponi, is, of course, conjecture. From what I understand, a lot of these symbols were used in a fairly widespread way.
I haven’t spoken to him in awhile, but I would imagine he’s still open for business and willing to make these necklaces and earrings. His prices are very reasonable.
sammarroq wrote: Has there been any findings as to the meaning of the symbols on this gorget?
Not all that recently, but it wasn’t on this thread — I recommended the essay by George Lankford, in the catalogue cited at post #39 in the following thread:
http://www.saponitown.com/forum/showthread.php?p=21464
That has to do with reconstructing native cosmology (in this case, of the mound builders about a thousand years ago, but, hey). There are many sources, including much more recent oral traditional creation myths, etc. But gorgets a good bit like this, specifically including the whirling woodpeckers design (shown above in post #136), are cited and interpreted.
Techteach actually went to see that exhibition (Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand), in Chicago. I just got the catalogue, a couple of years later.
Anyway, in broad terms, there is a three part universe; we’re in the middle, and there’s a sky world above and an underworld below us. Heroes, gods, shamans, some totemic animals, et al have had the ability to visit between worlds. One route to the above world is via the whirlwind, and one route to the below world is via the whirlpool. (There are other routes, such as flying, climbing rainbows, swimming, entering deep caves, etc. And, most notably in the case of shamans, trances.)
Since I’ve always thought this particular Occaneechi Town example is meant to be a spinner, that would fit in with the cosmological concept. But ours is several hundred years newer than those Cox Mound style gorgets, with the ivory-billed woodpeckers chasing each other around the perimeter. Our people had lost a lot of the shell-working skills, by 1700; but they hadn’t necessarily lost the myth and cosmology these designs appear to have been evoking. It just took a graphically simplified form.
The design in the center is not Saponi. the image in the center is the emblem of a tribe…not the Saponi tribe.
If someone wants to wear this design….then they have to keep in mind that is it is not Monacan or Manahoac they are representing with it.
Also it was not found on Monacan or Manahoac land.
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