Smoked Woodpecker, Anyone??

Really y'all, I do NOT have a fixation on ethnic contributions to Southern food.  I find it interesting, and some of the current arguments rile me considerably, but it's sure not my primary focus of study.  In fact, while I have a passion for the subject of Southern food, my primary scholarly interests still lie in our regional decorative arts.

For that very reason, you'll see some of my posts are simply going to be brief looks at small Southern treasures.  Some may have intrinsic value, some antique value, and some just cultural value.  Thing is, money isn't so very important in discerning things of value to us.  As Southerners, utilitarian objects that remind of simpler times are as "valuable" as museum-quality art.

Here is a sampling.  Oh no, I hear it now.  Pick Pick Nitpick Pick.  You don't think it's old, and you don't think the date is right, and you....well, I'm not concerned with you.  If I share something, it's gonna have artistic and cultural meaning to the South.  Even if I or someone else gets the final evaluation wrong, it's still gonna have merit and help tell our greater story.  OK?

This is a "Great Pipe" or Woodland Period, pre-Columbian effigy pipe.  This culture predominated in the South from about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus until the time Europeans came in contact with the native tribes.

I'm borrowing directly here from the Peach State Archaeological Society, who explains better than I that, "This group of pipes, often called Great pipes, include those stone pipes that represent various animals and birds that are smaller than the large ceremonial pipes and simply have pipe bowls attached to them.  Ron Smith of Calvert City, Kentucky applied the name “Great Pipes” to this type when addressing the Woodland cultures of Kentucky in the CSAJ, Vol.58, No.4, 2011.  He correctly stated that this type of effigy pipe was primarily of birds, although other types of animals are also known, and that they find their focus in the Woodland period sites of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas.  Gordon Willey believed these pipes were typical of the Copena culture that inhabited the areas mentioned by Smith during the Hamilton and Copena phases of the late Middle Woodland period, dating between 100 and 500 A.D."

They go on to document a bird effigy pipe discovered in Bourbon County, Kentucky.  Shown here is another such pipe that recently surfaced in a private Indiana collection with an oral history of having been dug as well in Bourbon County.  Age is, as with most effigy pipes, speculative, but isn't she lovely!

See as well Plate XIII, Figure 1. Ancient work in Bourbon County, from Squier & Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) as a reference to the ancient cultures of the region.  Effigy pipes from Kentucky are well documented, but remain rare in availability.