Artistry, Status, and Power: How 'Plummet'-Pendants Probably Functioned in Pre-Columbian Florida—and Beyond

Summary

For over one hundred years, archaeologists have been puzzled by the "plummet," so-called because its use was unknown, and because it had a superficial resemblance to what Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language defines as "a lead weight...hung at the end of a line ... used to determine how deep water is or whether a wall, etc. is vertical." In 1990 in The Florida Anthropologist, I published '"Plummet'-- An Analysis of a Mysterious Florida Artifact." In that article, I presented evidence supporting the thesis that plummets functioned in precontact Florida mainly as pendants, conveying beauty and status, and not as fishing sinkers or elements of composite fishhooks (Reiger 1990).

At the end of my analysis, I pondered the question of whether these pendants could have had additional uses; one such possibility might be their function as "charmstones," as first suggested by Clarence Moore in 1907 (Moore 1907:459). My essay ended at that point, however, with the charmstone hypothesis left untested. The purpose of the present article is to present the results of my subsequent research into the charmstone hypothesis, as well as additional findings regarding the other functions for plummets that have been proposed by students of archaeology.

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