Arkansas Ceramics Collection

There are 256 complete ceramic vessels from Arkansas in the Milwaukee Public Museum's collections, most dating to the Middle (AD 1200-1400) and Upper (AD 1400-European contact) Mississippian periods. A large portion of the collection came from three donors, C. W. Riggs, G. E. Pilquist, and T. M. N. Lewis. The first two were artifact collectors and dealers; Riggs's material has no provenience other than "Arkansas," but Pilquist's items were collected from the Carden Bottoms area in west-central Arkansas. Lewis was an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee, but most of the ceramics were given to him by local farmers and thus again have no specific locality.