page_title: Mississippian stone statuary
section_title: Middle Tennessee region
hierarchical_section_title: Mississippian stone statuary / Tennessee-Cumberland style / Middle Tennessee region
caption_attribution_description: Mississippian culture; Male figure; Stone Sculpture. Discovered at the Link Farm Site located at the confluence of the Duck and Buffalo Rivers in Humphreys County, Tennessee, as part of of a paired male and female set of statues nicknamed "Adam" and "Eve" by the discoverers.&#91;1&#93;&#91;2&#93;
context_page_description: The Mississippian stone statuary are artifacts of polished stone in the shape of human figurines made by members of the Mississippian culture and found in archaeological sites in the American Midwest and Southeast. Two distinct styles exist; the first is a style of carved flint clay found over a wide geographical area but believed to be from the American Bottom area and manufactured at the Cahokia site specifically; the second is a variety of carved and polished locally available stone primarily found in the Tennessee-Cumberland region and northern Georgia. Early European explorers reported seeing stone and wooden statues in native temples, but the first documented modern discovery was made in 1790 in Kentucky, and given as a gift to Thomas Jefferson.
context_section_description: The most numerous examples of this style are found in the Middle Tennessee region, mostly within the area between the Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys, with more than fifty currently known. Three of the most productive sites in this area have been the Sellars Site, the Castalian Springs Mound Site and the Beasley Mounds Site, with examples also being found at the Mound Bottom site and a unique cache of ceramic figurines at the Brick Church Pike Mound sites.
  The most well known statue from this region is the 47 centimeters (19 in) "Sandy" statue, the male half of a pair dug up in 1939 from the Sellars Mound in Wilson County, Tennessee. Now in the Frank H. McClung Museum in Knoxville, it has been used on numerous book and magazine covers as well as on a U.S. postage stamp as part of the Art of the American Indians series.
  A paired set of male and female sandstone statues was disocvered in March 1895 at the Link Farm Site at the confluence of the Duck and Buffalo Rivers south of Waverly in Humphreys County, Tennessee. The site is also famous for being the location where the "Duck River Cache" of chert artifacts was discovered in December 1894 in a low hillock at the site. The statues were found in the same but slightly deeper location. They were nicknamed "Adam" and "Eve" by their discoverers. The male statue is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the female statue has been lost.
caption: "Adam", the Link Farm Site sandstone statue discovered in 1895 on the Duck River
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