Fish - an important food, are not depicted in American Bottom Mississippian art.

It is worth noting the potential uses of wetland animal species depicted in full body on pipes, pottery, and engraved shell. Although most, if not all of the animals, were utilized for food (ECON), the most important animal foods, fish and deer, are conspicuously absent from American Bottom Mississippian art. Considering the proposed importance of deer as a food for important people, this absence is puzzling. Why the most important meat sources (judging from Mississippian faunal assemblages; ECON) are not depicted in Mississippian art from the American Bottom remains to be explained. It may be significant that although rare, fish-decorated bowls are known from other Mississippian ceramic traditions in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys to the south and east.

Modified swan limb bones, Cahokia site.

Frog effigy pipe, American Bottom.

Waterfowl, another important food source, are sometimes also depicted in Mississippian art. More common than artistic representations, however, are bead manufacturing debris - the modified (cut, scored, and slotted) waterfowl limb fragments. The long and hollow swan limb bones apparently were particularly well-suited to this specialized use.

Although frog remains are frequently recovered from Mississippian sites and were a food source, it is doubtful that this amphibian made significant contributions to the diet. Rather, the reasons for their depiction may lie with their association with the lower, water world and with specialized uses. The skin of many amphibians are known to be toxic, for example. Some are hallucinogenic and may have been ritually important in vision quests and communicating with spirits and supernatural beings from the upper and lower worlds. The shaman's rattle held by the frog in the frog effigy pipe is suggestive of the shaman's ritualistic transformation into another being, perhaps through ingesting a hallucinogen.

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