Eagle Platform Pipe
1 of 5
Object Label
In ancient times the hawk was associated with the noonday sun, forces of nature, and summer activities. This pipe bowl, which would have been attached to a wood stem, may have represented a family crest. Such a finely sculpted pipe bowl would have been treasured and given the clan owner great status. The smoke would have sent “prayers” into the sky and called down the sacred spirits.
Caption
Hopewell. Eagle Platform Pipe, 1–400 C.E.. Stone, lead eyes, 3 3/8 x 1 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. (8.6 x 3.0 x 11.0 cm). Anonymous loan, L49.3.1. Creative Commons-BY (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, L49.3.1_profile_PS9.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Culture
Title
Eagle Platform Pipe
Date
1–400 C.E.
Period
Woodland Period
Geography
Place found: Naples, Illinois, United States
Medium
Stone, lead eyes
Classification
Dimensions
3 3/8 x 1 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. (8.6 x 3.0 x 11.0 cm)
Credit Line
Anonymous loan
Accession Number
L49.3.1
Rights
Creative Commons-BY
You may download and use Brooklyn Museum images of this three-dimensional work in accordance with a Creative Commons license. Fair use, as understood under the United States Copyright Act, may also apply. Please include caption information from this page and credit the Brooklyn Museum. If you need a high resolution file, please fill out our online application form (charges apply). For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
Frequent Art Questions
Beautiful stone work! What tools would Hopewell artists use to chisel the stone with such detail and smoothness?
The Hopewell likely would have used other stones for their carvings. The smoothness indicates the use of rubbing, wet polishing, or sand.Thanks! Is the bird made of a soft kind of stone, like limestone?Though the Hopewell didn't develop bronze technology, they sure did accomplish great feats in stone and ceramics. This is a loan item and we haven't yet done extensive material analysis on this work. We do know that it is made of a harder stone.Are there any other works nearby that catch your eye or mystify you with the way they were produced?All of them in fact! I'm continuously amazed at the purely manual craft skills of people who lived several thousand years back!I am as well! I couldn't imagine developing this technology myself! I'm always taken by the nearby Mimbres bowl. (It has an antelope and a man depicted in the center.)The Mimbres people were some of the earliest people to develop reduction firings to achieve the black on white decoration, building an open kiln fire that was so hot it actually reduced the amount of oxygen within the fire. (If you're a ceramic nerd this is a big feat.)
Cool! And thank you for directing my attention to this beauty, its patterns and figures are incredibly delicate, the graphic parts reminds me of Art Deco almost!I love the imagery of the Mimbres people myself. It's so mysterious because they vanished long before European contact, nearly all of their bowls depict these strange dreamlike scenes and a majority of them have these holes in the bottom.Many have been found in graves, although we are not certain where this particular bowl was found, and scholars can only speculate what the holes might mean, or what the strange images are. One at the Met has a deer putting on an armadillo mask on for example.That's fascinating! I bet it carries deep meaning that we just don't know today.
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