Long-nosed god maskette

File:Il maskette pike co nmai.jpg in Pike County, Illinois, now in the N.M.A.I.]]

The first long nosed god maskette was found next to a skull in a grave in Big Mound in St. Louis in 1870. Since then over twenty of these artifacts have been discovered in an area encompassing at least ten states.{{cite journal|journal=Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology|year=2000|volume=25|pages=1–26|number=1|author1=Duncan, James R.|author2=Diaz-Granados, Carol|title=Of Masks and Myths|jstor=20708122}} They have also been found in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin, but the majority have been found in Illinois. Excavations at the Gahagan Mounds Site in Louisiana in 1939 produced a matched pair of copper maskettes. The largest examples yet found were a pair of copper masks dug from a mound in Calhoun County, Illinois by William G. Fecht. One is {{convert|22.4 |cm|in}} and the other {{convert|22|cm|in}} in length. Clarence Bloomfield Moore found two copper examples when he excavated the St. Johns culture Grant Mound in Duval County, Florida in 1894 along with two biconical copper covered ear-spools similar to ones from Cahokia.{{cite journal|title=On the periphery of the Early Mississippian world : Looking within and beyond Northeastern Florida|author=Ashley, Keith H.|journal=Southeastern Archaeology| url=http://www.unf.edu/~kashley/Other%20Files/2002-periphery.pdf|volume=2|number=2|date=2002}}

Archaeologists have long used the maskettes for dating different phases of the Mississippian culture. In the 1950s Stephen Williams and John Mann Goggin proposed the existence of an early Mississippian Long nosed god horizon based on the distribution and chronological positioning of the finds.{{cite news|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7737/is_200907/ai_n39230890/|title= CORRECTED PROVENANCE FOR THE LONG-NOSED GOD MASK FROM "A CAVE NEAR ROGANA, TENNESSEE"|access-date=2010-07-30 | work=Southeastern Archaeology | year=2009}} In 1989 Jon Muller of Southern Illinois University proposed reorganizing the classification of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex into five horizons, with each as a discrete tradition defined by the origin of specific motifs and ritual objects. The first horizon he defines for his Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere is the Developmental Cult Period which went from 900 to 1150 CE and is marked by the appearance of the Long nosed god maskettes.{{cite book | editor= Galloway, Patricia|author =Muller, Jon| title=The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, Artifacts and Analysis:The Cottonlandia Conference| article = The Southern Cult | publisher = University of Nebraska Press| year = 1989 | pages = 11–26}}

File:Spiro Big Boy effigy pipe HRoe 02.jpg

{{cquote|The long-nosed god maskettes may have functioned in the Early Mississippian Period of the eastern United States within an adoption ritual much like that of the Calumet ceremony of the historic period.----to create fictions of kinship between the powerful leader of a large polity and his political clients in outlying areas. |20px|20px|- Timothy R. Pauketat 2004{{Cite book|title=Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians|first=Timothy|last=Pauketat|author-link=Timothy Pauketat| page=216|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-52066-9|year=2004}}}}

Some archaeologists, including James B. Griffin of the Smithsonian Institution, at first believed that the Long-nosed god masks were evidence of contact with Mesoamerica. They identified the masks as possible representations of the Aztec deity Yacatecuhtli,{{Cite web|url= http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/indianhill.html | title=Indian Hill Mound in St. Louis County, Missouri| access-date=2010-08-01|year=2008|author=Fuller, Michael}} an aspect of Quetzalcoatl whose name means “The Lord Who Guides”. Yacatecuhtli was worshipped by the pochteca, a class of professional long-distance traveling merchants. In the 1990s anthropologist Robert L. Hall proposed that the maskettes were used by Mississippian peoples as part of ritual adoptions in which important leaders extended fictive kinship to visiting leaders in order to cement political alliances and trade relationships.{{Cite web|url= http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/tejas/fundamentals/images/prec41.html|title=Tejas| access-date=2010-07-30}} Hall, an expert on Native American belief systems, theorised that the maskettes were used to identify individuals involved in the adoption rituals with the figures of Red Horn (who was also known as "He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-As-Earrings") and his sons.{{Cite web|url=http://www.mpm.edu/collections/artifacts/anthropology/aztalan/outpost/|title=Aztalan – Wisconsin's Middle Mississippian Outpost|publisher=Milwaukee Public Museum|access-date=2010-07-30|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100527175058/http://www.mpm.edu/collections/artifacts/anthropology/aztalan/outpost/|archive-date=2010-05-27}}{{cite book|

author=Hall, Robert L.|author-link=Robert L. Hall|title=An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yUvbvgFakkwC&q=florida+long+nosed+god+maskette&pg=PA148|year=1997|publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=978-0-252-06602-3}} Many of the myths of Red Horn and his sons, found amongst the Chiwere Siouan-speaking people including the Ho-Chunk and Ioway, involve instances of kinship and adoption. In his guise as "He who Gets Hit with Deer Lungs", Red Horn is also associated with the Calumet ceremony, which is another fictive kinship/adoption ritual.{{Cite encyclopedia| title = Redhorn (Wears Faces on His Ears)|first=Richard L.|last= Dieterle| encyclopedia = Encyclopedia of Hočąk (Winnebago) Mythology| access-date = 2010-08-19|url=http://www.hotcakencyclopedia.com/ho.Redhorn.html }} The differing shapes of the noses found on earpieces, including long, bent and short varieties, are explained by the myths as differing stages of the ritualized adoption process. In one Caddoan myth, the "wild brother" of the Hero Twins possesses a long nose which is magically shortened by a medicine man. This has led some researchers to think the masks start as the long nosed variety, denoting the first stage in the initiation process. As the individual progresses through the rituals, the nose is symbolically bent and eventually trimmed in the final phase, denoting full acceptance into the kinship system.

• Mississippian copper plates
• Mississippian culture pottery
• Mississippian stone statuary
• Shell gorget
• Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas

{{reflist}}

{{commons category|Native American shell art}}

• [http://www.esarey.us/duane/files/SampsonEsar1993MissCopp.pdf Mississippian Copper]
• [http://www.nmai.si.edu/searchcollections/item.aspx?irn=259262&objtype=Masks%20and%20Masking&page=6 Maskette at the National Museum of the American Indian]
• [https://www.jstor.org/pss/278753 The Short-Nosed God from the Emmons Site, Illinois]

{{Mississippian and related cultures}}

{{Pre-Columbian North America}}

Category:Mississippian culture

Category:Native American sculpture

Category:Native American relics

Category:Seashells in art