Nodena Phase

The Nodena Phase is an archaeological phase in eastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri of the Late Mississippian culture which dates from about 1400–1650 CE. The Nodena Phase is known from a collection of villages along the Mississippi River between the Missouri Bootheel and Wapanocca Lake. They practiced extensive maize agriculture and artificial cranial deformation and were members of a continent wide trade and religious network known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, which brought chert, whelk shells, and other exotic goods to the area.

The Spanish Hernando de Soto Expedition is believed to have visited several sites in the Nodena Phase in the early 1540s, which is usually identified as the Province of Pacaha.

Nodena Phase sites are found in three geographic subdistricts: the Wilson-Joiner, the Wapanocca Lake, and the Blytheville subdistricts.

The largest site in the Wapanocca Lake district is the Bradley Site (3 Ct 7). The Bradley Site and its nearby cluster of towns and villages (3 Ct 9, 3 Ct 43, 3 Ct 14, 3 Ct 17, Banks Site) are considered good candidates for the Pacaha capital and the other nearby villages visited by the de Soto expedition.

Most pottery found at the Nodena sites is of the Mississippian Bell Plain variety. It was buff colored, contains large fragments of ground mussel shell as a tempering agent, and is not as smooth and polished as other varieties. Other examples found there are much finer, with a finer ground shell as a temper, some instances being so finely ground as to look untempered. Shapes and decoration were varied in the mortuary pottery, from brighly colored abstract spiral designs, to elaborate effigy vessels depicting human heads, animals, and hunters and their prey. Pottery made by the Nodena people was built up from strips of clay, and then smoothed out by the potter, much like other pottery in the Eastern America area where the potters wheel was unknown. Slips using galena for white, hematite for red, and sometimes graphite for black were used to paint the pottery, with a red on white swastika design being particularly popular. Sometimes incising was used (an example is the incised raptor image on the effigy head pot pictured), although it is rare in Nodena pottery. Women were probably the makers of pottery, as in most other Native American cultures. The grave of a woman at the Nodena Site contained 11 polishing pebbles and a mushroom shaped pottery anvil.

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