FIGURE 3.—Comparison of bird representations in the Poverty Point-Hopewell and Olmec-Tlatilco lapidary industries, a-c, f-h.
Bird effigies, d, i. Thin spangles with bird features. e,j. T u b u l a r beads, {a, after Ford and Webb, 1956, fig. 38i. b, d-e, after W e b b and Ford, ms. c, after Mills, 1916, fig. 4 7 . / , after Weiant, 1943, pi.
74-3. g, after Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959, pi. 27a. h, after Lorenzo, 1965, fig. 68. i-j, after Drucker 1952: i, pi. 58; j , pi.
57A-p.)
jasper. These range from quite realistic representa- tions to T- and L-shaped objects, which would not be suspected of representing birds (fig. 3d) if the transi- tional forms were not present. A fourth type of carved tubular bead at Poverty Point, also biconically drilled and made of jasper, is not so clearly a representation of a bird. In fact, it is not so certain what is represented.
At the Crystal River site of Florida, Moore (1903, p. 399, fig. 46) found a rock crystal pendant, which he suggests was carved to represent a bird. T h e abun- dance of pendants and beads from Crystal River (A.D.
1-600) probably justifies citing this complex as having a lapidary industry.
Willey (1949a, p. 547), in reference to this time horizon for the Gulf coast of Florida says, " I n general, articles like stone beads, bar amulets, stone gorgets, stone pipes, and rock-crystal ornaments were more usual in Santa Rosa-Swift Creek than in Weeden Island."
In the Classic Hopewell complex of Ohio, birds were realistically carved as the bowls for platform pipes (fig. 3c). A substantial number of these pipes have been found and the representation is so excellent that the species can usually be identified. They range from ducks to small perching birds.
Although there is considerable work in small pieces of stone, particularly green slate, in the Momil Phases on the north coast of Colombia, there are no repre- sentations of birds in this material. An interest in birds as well as animals, however, is shown by pottery rim adornos (Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. and A., 1956, fig. 13).
O n the coast of Ecuador, small stone carving is rare before the beginning of the Regional Developmental Period at 500 B . C Small representations of birds and human figurines are in the Jambeli culture carved in shell (Estrada, Meggers, and Evans, 1964, figs. 8-9).
Work in stone is somewhat more common in the Kotosh Phase of highland Peru. Among the objects illustrated by Izumi and Sono (1963, pi. 1 1 0 B - 2 2 , -27) are what appear to be small birdheads, which are suspended by holes through the eyes.
T h e use of animal claws and teeth as pendants is a fairly common trait in many cultures. Representation of these items in bone and shell is also widely spread in time and space in the Americas. Imitations carved in jade, quartz, jasper, and other hard stones seem to have a more limited distribution, and are a peculiarity of certain Formative horizons in the Americas.
Representations of animal canines, jaguar canines according to Drucker (fig. 4A;; Drucker, 1952, p. 162, pi. 57), occur at La Venta in pairs associated with earspools found accompanying burials, and apparently were pendants attached to these orna- ments. All of these representations are made of jade, and in several cases are hollowed on the back so that
the canines are translucent. In addition to the sets found in the early excavations, Drucker, Heizer, and Squier (1959, pi. 39) illustrate another set of jewelry, which also included canine representations. A single stone canine tooth came from Tres Zapotes (Weiant,
1943, pi. 76-13).
Lorenzo (fig. 4:j; 1965, p. 48, fig. 64) records two stone canine teeth from Tlatilco. One is made of a green stone, the other of an unidentified stone. The perfora- tion on one tooth is biconical, on the other single- conical. Vaillant (fig. 4/; 1931, pi. 40; 1941, pi. 16) also illustrates a jade canine tooth ornament from Zacatenco.
Five representations of either canine teeth or per- haps animal claws, have been collected from the Poverty Point site (fig. 4 a - ^ ) . One of these is green slate, another quartz crystal, and the remainder are red jasper. Three of these are somewhat more comma-shaped than are the realistic jade canine teeth of the Olmec culture, and in this respect more nearly resemble ceramic decorative motifs found on ceramics and carved in copper and mica in the Classic Hopewell of the Upper Mississippi Valley.
The people of the Hopewell culture of Ohio were very much interested in animal teeth. They imported the canines of grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains, and alligator teeth from the Lower Mississippi. Bear teeth are very commonly drilled and set with pearls.
Imitation bear teeth of stone were found in the Hopewell Mound Group (Moorehead, 1922, fig. 35), and were represented in mica (Shetrone, 1926, fig.
139). Drilled dog, bear, and wolf canines, sometimes also set with pearls, are characteristic of the Classic Hopewell Phase of Ilhnois (Walker, 1952, pi. 8;
Neumann and Fowler, 1952, pi. 77).
As an interesting sidelight, Drucker (1952, p. 162, fig. 46a, pi. 52) illustrates a typical set of Olmec jewelry consisting of jade beads, a human dwarf figurine, and pulley-shaped earspools. In this instance the pendants represent animal jaws (fig. 4m), perhaps deer jaws with teeth and incisors indicated. These resemble two objects of bituminous shale from a Marksville Phase (100 B . C - A . D . 400) burial mound (fig. 4e), which Ford and Willey (1940, fig. 5lf) illustrate and describe as probably grasshopper effigies.
It now seems clear that these items are shown upside down, and that the lines thought to represent division in the thorax of the insect really mark the molar teeth. The canines are broken off. These also are imitation animal jaws.
Apparentiy the Formative people of the South American Andean region were littie interested in canine teeth as ornaments, either taken from the animal or imitation. This seems a littie strange in view of the common representation of the cat demon with his
-^ J
-'^^^^-^f-i'X^A^i'&.fti^i:
Poverty Point-Hopewell Olmec-Tlatilco
FIGURE 4.—Comparison of small biomorphic ornaments in the Poverty Point-Hopewell and Olmec-Tlatilco lapidary industries.
a-d, j-l, Animal canines or claws, e, m, Animal j a w s . / , n-o, H u m a n masks, g-h, p, Hearts or leaves, i, Foot, q, Hand, {a, after Moore- head, 1922, fig. 35. b, after Deuel, ed., 1952, pi. 77h. c-d, g-i, after Webb and Ford, ms. e, after Ford and Willey, 1940, fig. 5 I f . / , after Ford, 1936, fig. \5m.j, after Lorenzo, 1965, fig. 64. k, m,p-q, after Drucker, 1952: k, pi. 57a; m, pi. 57c; p, pi. 57A-r; q, pi. 54b.
/, after Vaillant, 1931, pi. 40. n, after Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959, fig. 43d. 0, after Drucker, 1955, pi. 34b)
324-788 O - 69 - b
64 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 1 1
canine teeth always prominently displayed. T h e only examples, however, seem to be the large tooth-shaped stone pendants of the Bahia Phase, coastal Ecuador (Estrada, 1962, fig. 97 a, c), also shown on some figurines (op. cit., figs. 50a, 85). These date from the Regional Developmental Period (500 B . C - A . D . 500).
In some of the offerings of jewelry found at La Venta, a small jade figurine seems to have formed the central piece, which probably was suspended around the neck (Drucker, 1952, pi. 52). In other sets, a small jade mask with Olmec style human features and a hollowed-out back (fig. 4n-o), seems to have been the principal item (Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959, fig. 43, pis. 37-40). Several biconically drilled holes probably served to attach these masks to clothing or a perishable backing. Similar small jade masks, thicker, and with a suspension hole transversely through the head, come from Kaminaljuyu in Guate- mala (Kidder, Jennings, and Shook, 1946, fig.
149d-e).
Only one mask, similar but somewhat simpler and made of a brown chert, has been collected from the Poverty Point Phase of the Lower Mississippi Valley (fig. 4/). This is illustrated in Ford (1936, fig. 15m), where it is mistakenly identified as belonging to the Caddoan Phase.
Some of the Olmec jade masks were hollow on the back. Apparentiy this made the stone translucent and enhanced its beauty. Willoughby (1917, p. 498, pi. 11) describes small owl, beetle, and deerhead objects from Hopewell mounds in Ohio, which are carved in the round and have been similarly hollowed out, apparentiy through very small perforations. Two are made of serpentine, one of calcite, one of red slate, and two are of antier.
Drucker (1952, pi. 54) illustrates a pair of human hands beautifully carved of jade (fig. 4^). There are no perforations and the use of these items is uncertain.
An L-shaped thin jasper pendant with a single per- foration from Poverty Point may represent a human foot (fig. 4 0 .
In the Hopewellian culture of Ohio, realistic human hands are cut from sheet mica (Shetrone, 1926, fig.
144). A bird foot (op. cit., fig. 143) is also realistically represented in this material. Designs cut from thin sheet copper appear to be bear paws (op. cit., fig.
152-7), and Moorehead (1922, fig. 38) shows a human thumb carved of cannel coal. Representations of spare parts are not common in the Formative of South America. Larco (1941, fig. 149), however, illustrates a stone bead that seems to be a crude animal or human foot from the Gupisnique Phase of coastal Peru.
From the tomb at La Venta, Drucker (1952, p. 169, pi. 57A-r) shows a small flat piece of pale blue-green jade, which he says represents either a heart or a leaf
(fig. 4p). He does not specify whether or not this ob- ject has a perforation in the stem from which it might have been suspended. Similar objects come from Poverty Point. O n e made of a gray stone has the stem perforated in the plane of the flattened body (fig. 4^).
Nine others of jasper have drilled holes in the stem at right angles to the plane of flattening (fig. 4h). Thin circular, rectangular, and triangular pendants with a single drilled hole are also found at Poverty Point.
Similar pendants are described by the Reichel- Dolmatoffs from Momil (1956, pp. 230-233), where they are usually made of green slate, a dark green stone, or steatite. Similar thin perforated tablets are illustrated by Izumi and Sono (1963, pi. 169). All of these items have conical or biconical drilled holes.
T h e typical Olmec technique of attachment for jade ornaments was to drill small holes close together
at angles so that they met in the interior of the object.
This is quite common on the edge of figurines and small jade masks. In Offering No. 2 at La Venta, Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, (1959, p. 149, pi. 28) found five small rock crystal objects slightiy over 1 cm.
in length which had pairs of "blind-drilled" holes at the ends and one side (fig. 5/). Although not identical these are very reminiscent of the fourteen small jasper buttons from Poverty Point (fig. 5a-b). They are circular or oval in outiine and average about
1.0-1.5 cm. in diameter. T h e flat side has two blind- drilled holes; the other side is either strongly curved or rounds up to a definite ridge. Some specimens have the holes centered and in others they are placed near one edge. While most of the buttons are red jasper, a few are galena.
While stone buttons are not common in the Upper Mississippi Valley, buttons made of stone, clay, and wood, and coated with a thin plating of copper, silver, or meteoric iron, were " n u m e r o u s " in the Hopewell Mound of Ohio (Shetrone, 1926, p. 170, fig. 98; Moorehead, 1922, p p . 120-121, fig. 16).
These were flat on one face and domed on the other, similar to the jasper buttons from Poverty Point. The attaching string passed through holes in the flat face.
It is probable that these objects were ornaments rather than true buttons. In any case it seems sig- nificant that after the decline of the Hopewell Phase, about A.D. 200, buttons of this shape were no longer made in the eastern United States.
T h e buttons that the Reichel-Dolmatoffs describe from Momil (1956, pp. 248, 251, figs. 14-15, 17, 20), were of shell and bone, and were made more like shirt buttons, being thin circular disks with a depres- sion in one face in which two small holes were drilled.
Among the quartz and turquoise beads from the Gupisnique Phase of coastal Peru, there is one object
that appears to be a small stone button with two connecting drill holes made from one face.
From the columnar basalt tomb excavated at La Venta, Drucker (1952, p. 163, pi. 53a-b) illustrates half of a clam shell beautifully carved from light grayish blue jade (fig. 5^). A very small representation of a clam shell was found in Offering No. 7 excavated in 1955. This was about 1.5 cm. long made of " a very clear emerald-green j a d e " (Drucker, Heizer, and Squier, 1959, p. 174, pi. 40). Two additional clam shells made of jade came from the offering at Cerro de las Mesas (Drucker, 1955, pp. 49-50, pis. 40a-a', 46e). In discussing these finds, Drucker (op. cit., p.
66) suggests that they are earlier Olmec specimens kept as heirlooms.
C. H. Webb and the writer, in the process of preparing a second paper on specimens from the Poverty Point site in Louisiana, had been puzzled by two small pieces of red jasper about 1 cm. in diameter, thin, flat on one face, slightiy rounded on the other, with one edge broken (fig. 5d). Each had a pair of drilled holes. T h e recent discovery of an unbroken specimen from Poverty Point solved the problem (fig. 5c). These are jasper representations of open shells. Their shapes are more similar to symmetrical seashells than to the mussels found in local rivers.
Drucker (1952, p. 163) describes, but does not illustrate, what seem to be two turtie effigies from La Venta: "At either end of a string of beads found in 1943 were two small rectangular pendants of jade with rounded corners, flat on one side, and a very low ridge down the axis on the other. A faint channel marking off the border on the ridged side increases the appearance of a turtle carapace. One of these objects has a sizable biconical perforation at the center of one end. T h e other is said to be perforated also . . . ."
A fragment of a very realistic turtle carapace from the Poverty Point site is made of polished brown limonite (fig. 5e). Complete, this object would have been about 6 cm. in diameter, flat on the bottom, and domed on the other side to about the proportions of the living animal. Incised lines mark off the plates of the shell in a realistic fashion. The edge of the broken part shows half of a conical drilled hole that passed through the carapace near one end.
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