Mississippian · Rhodes Incised bottle
Rhodes Incised is a Mississippian pottery type of the central Mississippi Valley, and this squat globular bottle carries its whole diagnostic vocabulary on one surface. Tightly nested spirals are cut into the body and interlock as they travel around it, so no single whorl is the motif — the field is. What makes the vessel worth a lesson is where the decoration stops: the incising ends at the shoulder and the narrow cylindrical neck is left plain, and that contrast between a crowded body and an empty neck is as diagnostic as the spirals themselves. It is the Academy’s first Mississippian lesson, and the first where the identification rests on a boundary rather than a motif.