Ancient Native American Pottery and Religion

Some of their specialization was in pottery. The Mississippian culture which the Etowah Indians were part of would have usually contained fragments of seashells as a binder and that is one way that you can tell Mississippian pottery from other cultural types of pottery is the inclusion of limestone and seashells. So by looking at the pottery that we find in the Mississippian period there are some things that we can tell. Looking at some pottery you'll notice that it's decorated with symbols such as some with crosses in the middle. This cross anytime you usually see anything crossed within the Native American cultures it has to do with what they call an axis mundi or the center of the universe. So it goes to their belief in a four part world meaning the east, west, north, south. Their north includes the upper spirit world and the south would also include an underworld like the world for the dead. We do have some pottery that has bird effigies on them. Birds live in the upper world so they're a lot of times associated with spirits. Whereas your circular symbols sometimes think of a rock splashing in water where you have water rings. It sometimes is associated with water. Water can be associated with portals to the underworld so the world of the dead. So a lot of times these will point you in the direction of spiritual uses. We have some here that have holes in them for hanging with strings so we know that when they were used they were hung from an item. So this would most likely be a cookie jar that you would hang over a fire or some type of storage jar. Also sometimes you will find a pot with a hole in the bottom of the pot. This is like a ritual sacrifice of the bowl itself because the bowl was considered to be a living entity. So sometimes in a burial you may find this in the bowl. A way of killing the pot. They would also do this with other structures but basically symbolic destruction of something so that it couldn't be used anymore.