Gifts of the Great River: Arkansas Effigy Pottery from the Edwin Curtiss Collection

by John H. House
foreword by Ian W. Brown

Harvard University Press, 2005
Paper: 978-0-87365-401-2
Library of Congress Classification E98.M6815H68 2003
Dewey Decimal Classification 738.30899707679

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK
In 1879 Edwin Curtiss set out for the wild St. Francis River region of northeastern Arkansas to collect archaeological specimens for the Peabody Museum. By the time Curtiss completed his fifty-six days of Arkansas fieldwork, he had sent nearly 1,000 pottery vessels to Cambridge and had put the Peabody on the map as the repository of one of the world's finest collections of Mississippian artifacts. John House brings us a lively account of the work of this nineteenth-century fieldworker, the Native culture he explored, and the rich legacies left by both. The result is a vivid re-creation of the world of Indian peoples in the Mississippi River lowlands in the last centuries before European contact. The volume's focus is Curtiss's collection of charming and expressive effigy vessels: earthenware bowls and bottles that incorporate forms of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and humans, including the Peabody's famous red-and-white head vase.

REVIEWS

This fascinating volume introduces readers to the little-known fieldwork of Edwin Curtiss and provides a fresh view of the exciting prehistoric ceramic art of northeastern Arkansas.
-- Stephen Williams, Peabody Professor of North American Archaeology Emeritus, Harvard University

The Peabody Museum is to be congratulated for its new Collections Series, which makes available to the general public and anthropologists alike some of its vast archaeological and ethnological collections from around the world.
-- Hester Davis, Arkansas State Archaeologist Emerita

John House, an archaeologist with the Arkansas Archaeological Survey and noted Mississippi scholar, has produced this splendid little book that describes the Curtiss expedition and the collections it produced. It is richly illustrated with 45 color photos of Curtiss's pottery collection, some of his sketch maps, and photos of the sites. Sadly, many of the sites in the region have been destroyed by modern agriculture and looting, but Gifts of the Great River preserves the story of the first expedition to one of America's richest archaeological districts.
-- American Archaeology

House selected works for twenty-five color plates and produced clear, informative paragraphs to accompany each photograph. The photographs themselves are spectacularly good...It is a stunning presentation, making the volume at one level an excellent coffee-table book...But it is much more than that, of course, as the excellent introduction demonstrates. In forty-one pages, House takes the reader through an introduction to the Parkin Phase, the basics of what is known or inferred about the cultural life of those prehistoric people, and a tour of the sites as they were dug by Edwin Curtiss, with many glimpses into the life of an 1880 archaeologist in the Arkansas delta.
-- George E. Lankford Arkansas Historical Quarterly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations 00
Foreword: Discovering the Curtiss Collection, by Ian W. Brown 00
Acknowledgments 00
Edwin Curtiss's Pioneering Archaeological Explorations in Arkansas 00
"This Is The Place We Have Long Sought" 00
"I Am Afraid That I Shall Be Interfeared With By High Water" 00
Color Plates 00
Notes 00
Suggested Reading 00




Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Mississippian pottery Collectors and collecting Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, )Effigy pottery Collectors and collecting Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, )Indians of North America Antiquities Collection and preservation Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, )Archaeological expeditions Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, ) History, Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, ) Antiquities, Curtiss, Edwin Travel Saint Francis River Valley (Mo,  and Ark, )Curtiss, Edwin Archaeological collections, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

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