Life in the Bottomland ~ Mississippian Period Town, an original painting, Copyright Susan A. Walton, S. A. Walton Studio, Hudson, Florida

Artist’s note:

This newly completed painting is of a Mississippian period town alongside a lazy bottomland slough or stream, complete with dugout canoes.

The young lady is wearing a twilled skirt and finger-woven belt or sash and carrying a river cane basket. Mississippians didn’t just rely on brain-tanned leather for clothing- they made both coarse and fine textiles, using dogbane, rabbit fur, bison hair, and other fibers.

The woman’s companion, carrying a southeastern style long bow, appears to have had a successful turkey hunt. Turkeys were not just good for eating, but also provided large primary feathers suitable for fletching arrows, small and colorful contour feathers for making warm feather capes, beards for ornamental use, and bones for making beads and flutes.

Fields of corn and squash and other cultivated garden plants both familiar and unfamiliar to people today, would have been even more extensive than depicted - for example, in the case of later historical Shawnee towns in Ohio, the towns were described as having fields that extended for miles. Imagine what kind of fields the more populous people in the pre-contact Mississippian era would have had to plant, in order to maintain their way of life!

What a temptation that corn must have been to the region’s raccoons, despite the danger of hunters and their dogs.

Towns like these would have quite a few canoes, used both for transportation and carrying goods to and from trading centers, fields, to carry materials like clay, chert and cane for artisans, and to use as fishing or hunting platforms. Lacking draft animals larger than dogs, such as the one depicted harnessed to a travois to pull loads overland, canoes and waterways were critically important to daily life, long distance travel, and warfare, though the waterways were not necessarily the most direct or quickest way to get about.

If you are interested in licensing illustrations like this for use on wayside signage or exhibits, please contact the studio, we will be happy to assist. If you are interested in a giclee reproduction suitable for decorating your home or office, please reach out.