Much earlier than most would imagine, bannerstones were made by predominantly nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples in the eastern half of North America between 6000 and 1000 BCE during the Archaic period. These anomalous carved stones are relatively small (3 to 5 inches in width), generally symmetrical, and have holes drilled down the center, leading collectors and scholars to surmise that they were placed on wooden rods and hoisted in the air as “banners.” We do not know what their makers would have called them, and we can only hypothesize what role they might have played in their lives.
Indigenous sculptors fashioned bannerstones from a wide range of materials, from soft sedimentary stone to metamorphic slate and even extremely hard rock such as granite or quartz. Like many ancient lithic carvings found in the Americas, they would have made these compositions using a river-worn round stone (known as a hammerstone) to peck and grind the surface into more than twenty-four different known bannerstone shapes. During the construction, sculptors drilled a central hole with a hollow river reed held between their hands and spun quickly back and forth, leaving ridges of concentric circles on the inside.
The makers of bannerstones enhanced the qualities of natural stone, and their unique three-dimensional compositions display remarkable stone-carving acuity. Sculptors often chose banded slate to carve wing-shaped bannerstones categorized in the literature as butterflies. The sculptor of a Double-Notched Butterfly bannerstone aligned the natural banding of the slate with the central raised spine of the stone. The thinner flanges flaring out from this central ridge highlight the undulating concentric bands in the slate. In another example, this Single-Notched Butterfly bannerstone of greenish black matte phyllite has subtle banding and cloudy inclusions that would have appealed to the artisan who carved the flanges into thin, slightly bowed wings. A sharp ridge runs parallel to the central drilled hole. The result is an exceptionally refined and fragile object that raises further questions about how it might have been used and cared for. Similarly delicate is the Double-Bitted Axe bannerstone, carved with near perfect symmetry from a soft sedimentary shale and with curved edges thinned to a millimeter .
The sculptor of a Double-Notched Ovate bannerstone carefully oriented the stone so that its dark banding moves diagonally across the composition, echoing and emphasizing its curved shape. The “hypertrophic,” relatively large size of this specimen makes it twice the weight of most bannerstones, suggesting it was used in performances or ceremonies where it could be clearly visible to a collective audience. When sculptors opted for quartz, they most often chose ferruginous quartz due to the striking patterns created by areas of milky white that contrasted with deeply saturated oranges, reds, and pinks—the result of iron present in the mineral . Given the hardness of quartz, this Hourglass bannerstone would have taken weeks or even months to complete. Like the Ovate bannerstone, this example is twice the size and weight of most bannerstones, placing it in the category of a rare hypertrophic sculpture. Whatever the purpose of bannerstones in the Archaic period, this one would likely have been singled out for special ceremonial performances, display, or exchange.
Objects from other contemporaneous cultures may offer clues as to the use and meaning of bannerstones. Throughout the ancient Americas, finely carved objects were made into tools and works of art. Tools were carved from stone, bone, ivory, or shell and were shaped to achieve a tangible end: a bone hook for fishing, an ivory point for the tip of a hunting spear, or a stone axe to carve a tree trunk into a dugout canoe. In the ancient Arctic, for example, sculptors carved walrus ivory into winged shapes that hunters placed on their harpoons as ornamental counterweights . Like bannerstones, these ivory carvings are emphatically symmetrical, evoking the bodies of winged animals. With this harpoon weight, the sculptor incised three stylized dots for eyes and pointed beaks that swirl around one another on each wing, iconic references to birds. Unlike this Arctic example, bannerstones remain entirely abstract, suggesting elegance and flight and evoking a poetic visual language similar to Constantin Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space .
Ancient sculptors also made tool-shaped carvings out of rare materials, such as the jade celt from the Olmec cultures of west central Mexico or the greenstone ceremonial axe from the Taíno cultures in what is now the Dominican Republic. These smoothly carved objects of rare and precious stone could not have been used as axes; they would shatter if used percussively. Their function was not to literally cut wood or flesh, but rather to symbolically refer to the action of the axe. The resulting objects thus possessed multiple possible meanings, very much like the enigmatic bannerstones.
After the Archaic period (8000–1000 BCE), bannerstones were no longer made by the Indigenous cultures of North America, nor do they appear to have been preserved as heirloom objects. They simply and inexplicably remained silent works of the past. In the early nineteenth century, as large-scale agriculture spread across the United States, farmers found thousands of bannerstones in ancient middens (trash heaps), shell mounds, or simply in the soil, where they had been left by the societies that created them.
In the twentieth century, archaeologists sought to define a specific use for bannerstones, including theories of them as weights placed between the knots of fishing nets or attached to the wooden shafts of throwing sticks used for hunting. However, many of these finely sculpted bannerstones are too fragile, too small, or too large to have been effectively used for these functions. The unearthing of bannerstones intentionally broken at the center further confounds our understanding of these objects. Broken bannerstones—such as the one found at Wynadot, Ohio, and now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History—were often placed in carefully arranged caches or buried with men, women, children, and infants. This is evidence that the stones were not necessarily buried with the person who made them and suggests that their breaking was perhaps related to acts of mourning and remembrance. To first find and then sculpt a piece of banded slate into a butterfly shape, with wings no more than a centimeter at its thickest and a millimeter at its edge, an ancient sculptor was testing the limits of material and form. To then, with a single well-aimed blow to the spine, break the stone in half to bury with a loved one is not necessarily an act of killing the bannerstone, but rather a way to repurpose it, to bring it into the woeful work of mourning. This act of intentionally breaking something so carefully sculpted reveals aspects of ancient and contemporary Indigenous concepts of materiality and the status of stone.
Bannerstones that have been found or excavated out of gravesites and are in public or federally funded collections are protected by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. Long-standing and descendant communities of Native Americans have the right to determine how objects found in Native American graves should be seen or not seen, reburied, or displayed in a museum. Those found in graves at Indian Knoll that are now in the collection of the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky have, as of January 2020, been removed from display as museum staff seeks to comply with NAGPRA and respect Native American wishes and perspectives.
There is nothing in provenance records to suggest that any of the five bannerstones in The Met’s collection were placed in or found in graves. Each of the five stones, two of which are extremely fragile, were carefully handled and preserved over six thousand years ago during the Archaic period. Works like these were meant by their makers to be seen, a testament to what mattered to them about the world they lived within and experienced. Our contemporary act of seeing bannerstones reveals something about the lives of people in ancient North America, and they continue to convey something of the spark of wonderment and agency that led to their making.