Found under the mandible of a burial at the Barton Ranch site, this shell mask gorget is 5 7/8 inches long. Northeast Arkansas has yielded a moderate number of similar objects, all of which are associated with late prehistoric/protohistoric contexts (Smith and Smith 1989).

The Hampson Museum Collection represents one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of American Indian artistic expression as well as a major source of data on the lives and history of late pre-Columbian peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. The collections at the museum are the result of extensive excavations of the Nodena Site as well as excavations at other sites in the region by Dr James K. Hampson, as well as work by others including the University of Alabama and the University of Arkansas.

The Virtual Hampson Museum was completed by CAST in 2010. The museum is the first of its kind to make such high resolution data available and was the subject of a UA Research Frontiers article in April 2010. In 2011 the museum has begun to receive substantial scholarly recognition. Below are a list of articles that reference the Virtual Hampson Museum.

For further reading about The Virtual Hampson Museum and to explore more models in their archive, visit this link - http://hampson.cast.uark.edu/about.htm