Challenging Birdstone Typologies: A Southern Ontario Legacy Collection Revisited

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Birdstones are a morphologically diverse group of ground stone objects found across eastern North America with concentrations around the Great Lakes region. In this paper, we revisit an assemblage of birdstones from the Royal Ontario Museum’s Archaeology of the Americas collection to challenge the fixity of existing birdstone types. Popular among antiquarians since the mid-nineteenth century, these enigmatic artifacts were first categorized according to evolutionary principles inspired by the natural sciences. Relative chronological orderings relied on morphological complexity, from the simplest to the most elaborate form. As more birdstones were found in context, archaeologists established three culture-specific types that persist to this day. Drawing on assemblage and anarchist theories to challenge the fixity of these three types, we consider how the properties of distinct stones relate to birdstones’ various and mutable forms and propose a materials-centered, situated, and flexible approach to birdstone typologies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36230.0