“Objects” and “forces” such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be sentient and knowing persons.

Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human”1

Note: It is an honor to bring images of bannerstones into this present to reflect on ways to see and revere these ancient Indigenous carvings. And though I will at certain times discuss the choices of their makers to bury them with their dead, I do not include in this essay bannerstones that were known to be removed from burials.

Looking at Indigenous bannerstones from what is known as North America, their unique shapes and symmetrically drilled holes carved from an array of lithics, from sedimentary stone to quartz, I wonder what stories they are telling (Figs. 1-9). Do their stories begin with the sculptors who made them east of the Mississippi Valley in 6,000 BCE or do they begin four billion years ago when volcanic heat from the earth’s core melted and congealed minerals to form the oldest terrestrial rocks?2 Left in middens and along riverbanks or carefully placed in caches or burials, bannerstones remained in the ground until they were tilled or dredged or dug out beginning in the nineteenth century, placed in private and public collections throughout Eastern North America, a rare few on display, most others stored in boxes, and others perhaps now or one day reburied. When we follow the stones that began before their carving and remain long after, the shifting meaning of bannerstones comes to light for the living and the dead.

From the Great Lakes to the Florida Panhandle and from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic, the bannerstone makers carved these distinctive stones, most of which can be held in the palm of a hand, between 6,000 and 1,000 BCE.3 They were predominantly hunters and gathers with no evidence of dramatic social divisions, making bannerstones not for a ruling elite, but for themselves. Choosing to live nomadically or in settled communities at places like Poverty Point, Louisiana or Indian Knoll, Kentucky, their horticulture consisted of augmenting the domestic growth of edible flora.4 With their mindful selection of lithics, they were attentive to the deep-time geologic formation of rocks themselves (Figs. 10-13). From warm soft-brown slate, to chalk white limestone, to speckled grey gabbro, to marbled green serpentine, to iron-infused quartz—the makers chose stones based on their color and geologic composition, which would have been linked in their minds and memory to particular places in the land. 

After chipping raw lithic material from an outcrop on the face of a mountain or picking up a stone found on the ground, the sculptor would take into their hand a piece of granite worn and pebbled by a river to use as a hammerstone to peck, grind, transform, and polish the surface of bannerstones into the shape they had imagined—making a rock sculpture with rock. Slow, repetitive, and percussive, the labor would envelope the sculptor, echoing out their intention into the surroundings. Sometimes they might work alone, at other times they would work in a circle of syncopated sound alongside flint-nappers and ax-makers. And though the term Stone Age has often been used pejoratively, it is most apt to describe this milieu where stone was the most ubiquitous ever-present material to shape and be shaped. Stone was used for making tools, ornaments, and was a material in which to store memories and reflect identity, not unlike in our digital age where our cell phones have become the intermediaries of our self-fashioning and experience.

With this Curved Pick bannerstone found in Glen Falls, New York one can imagine how the sculptor delighted in the naturally occurring dark banding of the metamorphic slate interrupted by the white trace fossil inclusion of a burrowing worm (Figs. 14-15).5 To highlight the symmetry of their composition the sculptor carved a central ridge along the axis of the perforation, accentuating and bringing into play the white inclusion and banding of the stone revealing aspects of Indigenous awareness of fossils as traces of life from a far distant past.6  On the other side of this work, the natural banding radiating out from the center is thinner, attracting and challenging the sculptor to compose both sides into a single composition. In the pre-thought of imagining and in their making, bannerstones were and remain visual displays of their makers’ individual stone carving acuity and fascination with the natural world.

To drill a hole into stone the sculptor would place hollow cane between their hands, rubbing back and forth, adding bits of sand to bite into and perforate the surface.7 This could take hours, days, or even weeks of work depending on the size or hardness of the bannerstone, some of which, like this igneous Southern Ovate, were left unfinished with the hole only partially drilled (Figs. 16-17).8 Many similar bannerstones were found along the Savannah River in Georgia where coarse- grained igneous rock is plentiful. As unfinished or finished bannerstones, these carvings are also found hundreds of miles south in Florida where rock of this kind does not exist, leaving an ancient trace of long-distance trade of specific bannerstone forms and materials. With this diorite Southern Ovate found in Hardee County, Florida we know the stone was carried hundreds of miles south from Georgia (Figs. 17-18). One can only imagine if it was the sculptor there or in Florida who meticulously carved and polished the semi-circular thinned out flanges or placed the delicate double trough design above the perforation. In the deep south of the lower Mississippi, in places like the densely populated city of Poverty Point there are no local sources of stone due to the force of the river on the land breaking lithics into sand and silt.9 Yet even here the inhabitants brought in lithic material from great distances to make bannerstones, demonstrating their essential importance to ancient Indigenous life on the North American continent.10

Ninety years after the Smithsonian publication, in a 1939 detailed book length study titled Banner-stones of the North American Indian, Byron Knoblock published maps indicating where bannerstones were made across Eastern North America with the heartland at the fulcrum where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet (Fig. 23). Knoblock also created a detailed typology naming twenty-four bannerstone shapes acknowledging that there were many exceptions and sub-categories that attest to the fluid and experimental nature of these Indigenous carvings where no two bannerstones are the same (Fig. 24).15

Beyond the excavating and explaining, bannerstones remain exquisite individual sculptural expressions that were made and valued for over 5,000 years. Inexplicably, after 1000 BCE bannerstones were no longer made nor did they live on as actively used lithics or as heirloom objects of successive Indigenous communities, pointing to their specific importance within a particular place and time. What they meant to the bannerstone makers and the community of people who saw and valued them and why they stopped making them remains elusive, unknown, or unknowable. In the realm of the everyday, with their perforated holes meant for some kind of assemblage, what did they adorn? Did people wear bannerstones on their bodies or hoist them in procession? On the other side of the ephemeral every day, we do know what people did with bannerstones beneath the ground. Into that ground, held fast, some were left in middens or along the banks of a river, others they carefully placed in caches or, with great intention, buried with the dead. Many of these bannerstone makers and their communities mindfully placed these carved stones in the ground, anchoring something of themselves as they seasonally left and returned with an echo of their placement in their memory. As part of the life cycle of these carvings, their makers intentionally broke a vast number of bannerstones, cleaved in half at the spine where they are most fragile due to the thin walls of the drilled perforations (Figs. 25-27). Archaeologists and historians of the ancient Americas have often identified this practice as “ritually killing” an object. Rather than killing, which implies an abrupt end, the act of breaking perhaps is more a transformation of the bannerstone, pointing to Indigenous concepts about the materiality of stone and the act of breaking, not to be killed or forgotten, but to be remembered as alive and active.

Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, advocated and fought for by Native Americans, the burial remains and funerary objects of Indigenous ancestors in the territories currently defined as the United States are no longer there for the taking for the collector’s shelf, college laboratory, or museum case. These remains and objects, including those bannerstones that were buried with the dead are protected from being disturbed unless permission has been granted by Native American Tribes or lineal descendants.17 In the newly revised NAGPRA laws of January 2024 who qualifies as a “lineal descendant” is not just a matter of tribal affiliation, but now “requires deference to Native American traditional knowledge, ” a much more complex and subtle point of reference.18 This shift in the law recognizes ancient and living Native American epistemological perspectives about who Native Americans are and what they have made and continue to make into and beyond the present.

In one particular case, in 2020, a few years before the publication of the revised NAGPRA laws, the William Webb Museum in Kentucky removed all photographs of the 55,000 objects, many of them funerary, that Webb excavated at Indian Knoll in 1936 and will no longer allow scholars to study these remains and objects “until legal compliance under NAGPRA has been achieved.”19 What “legal compliance with NAGPRA” specifically means for remains dating back to 4,050 BCE is profoundly complex. With the long history of colonial and United States government violence and especially with the ratification of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, many of the Native American families and tribes in areas where bannerstones had been made were forced to move west of the Mississippi further disassociating them from ancestral lands.20 How the William Webb museum will choose to follow NAGPRA, which Native communities the museum will reach out to, and what those communities will choose to do with the burial remains of their ancestors taken from Indian Knoll will set a precedent unfolding into the present.

Into the shell mound at Indian Knoll ancient Indigenous people placed whole and intentionally broken bannerstones on or next to the bodies of children, women, and men. Here we know that the people who made these bannerstones placed them in acts of burial and mourning to create connections that were meant to remain as long as the life of stone itself. When and however possible, these funerary bannerstones are to be repatriated, and if so chosen, literally returned to the ground similar to the way the remains of the Ancient One known as Kennewick Man was reburied on February 18, 2017 in an undisclosed location along the Columbia river in the state of Washington by two hundred members of the Colombia Plateau tribes.21 Whatever the aims of post- Enlightenment science or the elucidating potential of the exhibition of objects, these ideological motivations must be abandoned or rethought in light of the desires, memories, practices, and philosophical underpinnings of Indigenous peoples.

NAGPRA creates clear guidelines for the return and care of funerary remains and objects and for demonstratively sacred objects of Native American cultural patrimony. The vast number of the several thousand bannerstones in museums fall into neither category. They remain in a free fall or suspension; few of them are on display or known to Indigenous people of North America as ancestral lithic carvings. In response to their obscurity, I began in 2016 to photograph them, placing all images and metadata on an open-source website entitled the Bannerstone Project supported by the Department of the History of Art and the College Library of the Fashion Institute of Technology and funded by the State University of New York.22 With this website we seek to bring bannerstones, at least on the visual level, out of their archival boxes to reflect upon the ontological arc of these carved stones: opening a possibility of listening to these works, which are amongst the most ancient stone carvings on the continent. Photography, a nineteenth-century technology and practice, like archaeology, has its own history and logic in how it represents people, objects, and moments. The photographic image can cut in many directions, further alienating objects from their makers or their contexts. In his study of bannerstones, Knoblock reproduced thousands of images of the stones he photographed in collections across the Northeast. In these black and white images, usually presenting one view of each stone lined up in neatly arranged categories of shapes, the bannerstones themselves appear lifeless, enclosed in the photographic image similar to the way they lay enclosed in museum boxes.

When I began to photograph bannerstones in the American Museum of Natural History in the spring of 2017 I wanted to learn from Knoblock, searching for a different way to engage that would be less encyclopedic and more responsive to the stones themselves. Given the privilege to hold them and look at them for long periods of time, I could feel subtle variations in their sculptured structure that I did not readily see with my eyes. Photographing at first on a tripod with studio lighting did not reveal the articulated details of the carvings that my hand could apprehend. There was something about the rigidity of the tripod that superimposed a Cartesian-like grid over the surface of the bannerstones. Straight on, back to front we see a flattened representation meant for a kind of quick consumption of the object. When I took the camera off the tripod, using strobe lighting, I was free; I could begin to follow the stone where the sculptor was leading. It was then, when I knelt down and photographed at an angle with raking light, that I saw how the sculptor had ground two separate planes that met at the center of the surface of each flange of this Curved Pick bannerstone (Fig. 31). Photographing from above at another angle revealed how the sculptor ground down the area surrounding the top perforation to create diverse modulations in the stone surface (Fig. 32).

Photographing in this way invited and revealed a different kind of attention that can bring us into the haptic texture of bannerstones with grooves from grinding with a hammerstone and sand visible on the stone surface of a Shield slate bannerstone found in Jefferson County, New York (Figs. 33-34). Looking closely and quietly, these polish scratch marks were the indexical trace of the person who imagined and made this work, reminding me of the handprints we see in paleolithic cave paintings from South America, Spain, and France.

To date, I have photographed 121 bannerstones chosen from the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History, the Ohio History Connection, and the Metropolitan Museum collections. As of September 2024, in the midst of writing this essay, the Bannerstone Project staff that I work with have removed all images and metadata of four bannerstones from the American Museum of Natural History and three plaster cast replicas of these stones in the National Museum of Natural History from the Bannerstone Project.25 What makes these bannerstones different from the others is that they were removed by A. E. Douglass in 1871 from a mound in a separate location from, though in proximity to, Indigenous archaic period burials.26 Seeking to follow both the spirit and the letter of the new NAGPRA regulations, and with advice from the AMNH staff, we are currently reaching out to the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, and the Muscogee Nation of the Tomoko Creek region where these bannerstones were originally cached over 5,000 years ago. Decisions that any one of these tribes may make will determine whether these bannerstones may remain in the museum, be photographed, or given to the tribes to rebury or revere in whatever manner they choose. This precisely is the point of the new NAGPRA regulations: to begin conversations between academics, museums, and tribal communities where decision-making is weighted toward Indigenous perspectives on multiple levels including the question of what is sacred.

In her writing about the red stone found in quarries in southeastern Minnesota and used for centuries by Indigenous carvers to make ceremonial pipes, Kim TallBear writes that the stone is considered “an artifact of ‘blood’ of a people . . . spoken of as a relative.”27 Definition by taxonomies and geological science risks “deanimating the red stone,” removing its life so intertwined with prayers and social relations where the making, holding, and smoking of pipes is an interactive communal ongoing practice.28  Similarly, thinking across time into the Indigenous past, Mitchif artist Audie Murray in her process-based multimedia installations takes us even further beyond the logic of extraction and catalogs (Fig. 40).

In her 2021 installation at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, entitled Chi Fii Embraces the Old Ones, she suspends on the wall two 144 x 72-inch digital photographs printed onto cloth vinyl whose lower edge rests, slightly folded, on the ground. While these images are in the gallery, Murray places two candles in front of each photograph with the warm light of the flame reflecting off their surfaces. With the placement of candles, she creates an altar, inviting the viewer into a flickering active process of engagement. In a conversation we had in the summer of 2024, Murray told me how each photograph represents a hammer stone, one her father found near their home in Regina and the other found by her uncle in a prairie field in Saskatchewan. Both were gifted to her and remain in her home or studio. For Murray, these are not stones that she owns, but rather living embodiments of the past that have been placed in her care.29 Murray places one of the hammer stones on a comfortable plush silver-white rabbit fur, the other on a dark animal skin. Around each hammer stone Murray wraps a beaded daisy chain she calls Chi Fii, evocative of the wild daisies that grow in the nearby fields. Chi Fii in the Michif dialect of the Métis people of the Northern United States and Southern Canada translates as “little girl,” a nickname Murray shared with her great grandmother. In her poem “Dream,” Murray writes:

I am beading a long daisy chain to remind myself of what it  

was like to be a child; only to realize the daisy chain is me, or a 

representation of a past self. The daisy chain is chi fii. 

As I wrap chi fii around hammer stone rocks, I am hugging the  

old ones. They work so hard, they are so old. They deserve to be 

cared for.30

The hammer stones, beads, and fur, the intimate physical objects that bind Murray to intergenerational multiplicities of Indigenous lives are beyond the reach of the excavator or collector. Instead, she gives us the photograph, and through the photographic medium she keeps safe and cares for the “old ones,” her ancestors and the stones themselves, cared for and seen at the same time, inviting us to witness a conversation she initiates between materials that speak to one another and to us.

Looking at Murray’s work, I wonder what names the bannerstone makers had for the stones they carved, both the materials and the completed works. I wonder what assemblages they too embodied and the stories they told. The colonial past and complex present cannot be erased from bannerstones; they have become part of their life. Together in conversation, Indigenous lineal descendants, intellectuals, artists, academics, and curators can begin the process of reanimating bannerstones so that they can more fully and vibrantly express themselves. On or just beneath the surface of the soil, across the North American continent there are points of spears, microblades, axes, ahls, lithic carvings, and shards as countless and many as there are stars in the sky (Fig. 41). Within this immense body of Indigenous carved stones, both in collections and still undisturbed in the ground of North America, bannerstones are one beckoning instance in the long duration of forms that challenge us to recognize and esteem the experiences and perspectives of their makers and the possibility of an ethical collaborative engagement with an Indigenous past and present.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank:

The Bannerstone Makers 6,000-1,000 BCE 

AMNH collection manger, Paul Beelitz 

NMNH collection manger, James Krakker 

OHC, collection manager, Linda Pansing and NAGPRA Specialist Nekole Alligood 

MMA, curator of Ancient American Art, Joanne Pillsbury 

FIT Bannerstone Project colleagues: 

Joseph Anderson, Digital Initiatives Librarian  

Molly Schoen, Visual Resources Curator  

Nanja Andriananjason, Visual Resources Technologist 

Danika Chartier, photography assistant at The Met 

MAVCOR editor, Emily C. Floyd 

I would also like to thank, S. Shaker, P. Dandridge and especially J. He and Niko in the everyday.