Fish or Bird Effigy Bowl

Bowl with engraved/appliqued flanges, shell- and grog-tempered pottery
Caddo (historic), 1500-1700
Upper Tisdale site (3HS98)
Hodges 77-1 / 21-69

This bowl with flanges attached near the rim is one of several effigies representing animals in the Hodges Collection. Some of the appliqued pieces – including the head – have broken off. When it was a complete bowl, the flanges represented wings of a bird or fins of a fish. Other flanged bowls can be seen in the Hodges Collection at the Caddo Center, as well as in the University of Arkansas Museum collections in Fayetteville.

Native people in the American Southeast visualized a three-tiered universe consisting of an Above World (the sky), a Middle World (the Earth), and a Below World (water), and included the animals that inhabit them. Effigy pottery, such as this, depicts certain animals that might come from one of these worlds. Which world do you think is represented with this bowl?

For another 3D model of a flanged bowl representing a bird from an ancestral Caddo site in Garland County, click on this Arkansas Archeological Survey web page.