In comparison to the considerable scholarship on drawings, prints, and photographs of Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners, the jewelry that prisoners created for themselves or other prisoners remains less investigated.1 Covertly constructed from scrap or excess metal in forced labor factories and workshops, pendants, pins, bracelets, and other metal objects were largely given as gifts to friends and family or exchanged for food or other resources. This essay is a survey of select jewelry objects constructed in the ghetto-camp Terezín of the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (current-day Czech Republic) and the Łódź ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland. Using a bracelet owned by Terezín prisoner Greta Perlman, jewelry constructed by Terezín prisoner David Grunfeld for fellow inmates, and various link bracelets and pins found in the ruins of the ghetto after its liquidation, this essay examines how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted some form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. Many of these objects employ shared visual motifs and use the interaction of image and text to document prisoners’ experiences. They carry constructions of agency, memory, intimacy, commemorating specific relationships and register individual identity in defiance of dehumanizing conditions.

Scholarship on jewelry tends to focus on decorative pieces that openly signal wealth and social status.2 However, the wearability of pieces of jewelry constructed in Holocaust-era ghettos and camps and their subsequent ability to openly declare wealth or status remains in question, given that the Gestapo and the ghetto administration limited or prohibited the ownership of personal belongings.3 Museum databases record many of these objects as secretly stashed in rooms, hidden on the body, or held tightly in hand, implying their clandestine nature.4 Nonetheless, even if these objects could not be openly worn or displayed, their production and content offer a perspective on the social hierarchies of the inmate communities and the role of cultural products within those hierarchies, as well as the values prized by inmate societies, particularly in regard to labor and marriage.

• 1
  See Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, Art of the Holocaust (New York: Rutledge Press, 1981); Gerald Green, The Artists of Terezín (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969); Miriam Novitch, ed., Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940-1945 (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1987); Mary Costanza, The Living Witness: Art in Concentration Camps and Ghettos (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982).
• 2
  See for example Clare Phillips, Jewelry: From Antiquity to the Present (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Melanie Holcomb, ed., Jewelry: The Body Transformed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
• 3
  Gerald Green, The Artists of Terezín (New York: Hawthorn, 1969). Prisoners were allowed to bring no more than forty pounds of personal belongings into Terezín, of which many chose to bring paints, books, and musical instruments. Prisoners’ valuable jewelry and money were immediately confiscated upon arrival, as was deported prisoners’ luggage at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
• 4
  Many museum object descriptions mention secrecy surrounding the survival of jewelry from Terezín and Łódź, such as Greta Perlman’s bracelet, which may have been hidden in a wall to avoid confiscation. See "Bracelet," Collection, Jewish Museum, accessed May 26, 2025, https://travel.thejewishmuseum.org/collection/20481-bracelet; or, Esther Klieger is described as holding the brooch made by her brother “tightly in hand” as one of her last personal belongings carried across several ghettos and concentration camps. See "Mementos from the Łódź Ghetto," Artifacts on Display in the Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/museum/mementos-lodz.html

Stationed thirty miles north of Prague, the ghetto-camp of Terezín (called “Theresienstadt” in German) was contained within the walls of a late-eighteenth-century fortress.5 During the Holocaust, more than 150,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark were sent and held there for months or years, before being sent by rail transports to their deaths at extermination camps in occupied Poland. Less than 20,000 prisoners survived Terezín by the end of World War II.

• 5
  Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 7. The Nazis used Terezín as a transit ghetto, an “advantage” ghetto (for certain groups like the elderly), and a propaganda ghetto. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Terezín as “a ghetto-camp,” classifying it as both a transit camp and a ghetto-labor camp; see "Theresienstadt," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 26, 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt.

Unlike other ghettos or camps, was notable for its well-developed cultural life and, in 1944, as the main site of the Nazi-supervised beautification programs, where Red Cross volunteers and Danish government representatives were given “tours” by Nazi officers of elaborate, constructed sets that did not reflect the realities of the site living conditions. The only ghetto where religious observance was permitted, Terezín’s considerable population of educated, wealthy, and artistic residents led to a functional lending library of 60,000 volumes, opera and orchestra concerts, and an annual open lecture series.6 In the ghetto’s metal and fabric workshops, residents were employed to create functional products both for themselves and for SS officers. Since jewelry as a personal item has no functional purpose, and therefore its production would not have been allowed or encouraged within these workshops, workers likely discretely constructed he objects considered in this essay using excess material from these workshops, as gifts for others, to be circulated within Terezín’s underground bartering system, or in direct exchange for resources.7

Imprisoned at Terezín from 1941 to 1944, Greta Perlman, a Czech Jew, likely benefited materially from her assigned work in the camp kitchens, receiving several pendants as gifts or in exchange for food. A complete set of those pendants is now held at the Jewish Museum in the form of a charm bracelet, although museum database records inform readers that most aesthetic objects from the Holocaust only exist today because they were stored in walls or buried underground for later retrieval, so Perlman may have assembled the complete set of pendants into a bracelet much later, after her survival of the Holocaust.8 Regardless, the sheer number, complexity, and specialization of the bracelet’s pendants attest to the significance of her work in the kitchens, a highly valued position in the inmate hierarchy due to its proximity to food.9 In a similar anecdote, Terezín cook Edgar Krasa describes himself as a “big shot” in the camp, commissioning several drawings from fellow Terezín inmates and artists Leo Haas and Bedřich Fritta, both considered key figures of Terezín’s visual arts community.10 The number of pendants gathered in this bracelet suggests Perlman may have played a similar role of patronage for metal artisans in Terezín. Although the artisan or artisans who constructed these pendants remain unknown, the bracelet offers an insight into the power structures and social strata within the inmate community and its transactional economy, confirming the status of “wealthy” individuals such as Perlman within the site and the social currency they wielded.

Although little biographical details are available from Perlman’s life besides her eventual emigration to America after the Holocaust, Perlman’s bracelet, bequeathed by her to the Jewish Museum in 1975, gives us a glimpse into her personal life at Terezín through scenes or miniature “tools” of agency, dignity, and love (Fig. 1). For example, pendants in Perlman’s bracelet provide some evidence for an enduring romantic relationship in the camp-ghetto, as researched by Jewish Museum senior curator Claudia Nahson.11 Two pendants holding ceramic shards are engraved, respectively, with Perlman’s first name Greta and that of a man named Theo, and in both instances are followed by the date I. IX. 43 (Figs. 3 and 4). Nahson argues that this shared date on two different pendants suggests a possible engagement, wedding, or anniversary date between Perlman and Theo, perhaps referencing the Jewish custom of breaking a glass at wedding ceremonies.

Separately, a seemingly innocuous pendant depicting a man surrounded by the letters G and W pronounce the activity of the Ghettowache, the ghetto police established in 1941 among Theresienstadt inmates to keep order in the camp (Fig. 2). Following the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943, the Ghettowache was disbanded; its members deported to extermination camps. Nahson theorizes that Theo may have been part of this informal police force and possibly deported; Greta may have had this pendant made in his memory. The pendants potentially commemorating Perlman’s romantic relationship with Theo emphasize the relationship’s importance to her in Terezín, and how connection and intimacy gave prisoners’ lives meaning. Their customization again attests to Perlman’s status as a patron of the arts and her social currency, which allowed her to commission these objects in the first place, and relates to a more general quality of specificity common to the Holocaust-era jewelry I have studied. Few objects were made to be traded to the general ghetto-camp community through underground bartering systems; instead jewelry was usually commissioned for specific people or purposes, often in memorial to certain people or events.

• 6
  Ibid., 168-200.
• 7
  See ibid., 128, for an explanation of Terezín’s bartering system. For many jewelry objects from Terezín and Łódź, museum online object descriptions mention an element of secrecy and resourcefulness behind their construction, with David Grunfeld constructing jewelry in secret at the camp in exchange for food or other resources at Terezín (see "David Grunfeld: Ring," Leo Baeck Institute, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/5566867), or craftsman Chaim Klieger using raw materials gleaned from aircraft pieces and other bits of metal at the Łódź ghetto (see "Chaim Klieger: Jewelry," Leo Baeck Institute, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/5566867).
• 8
  “Bracelet,” Jewish Museum, accessed May 26, 2025, https://travel.thejewishmuseum.org/collection/20481-bracelet.
• 9
  Hájková, The Last Ghetto, 66.
• 10
  Ibid., 180.
• 11
  Jane Levere, “This Remarkable Charm Bracelet Chronicles a Life Inside a Concentration Camp,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 16, 2018, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remarkable-charm-bracelet-gives-us-sense-life-inside-concentration-camp-180968805/.

Arranged second-to-center, signaling its importance to her and to the bracelet as an object, a key pendant speaks to Perlman’s work within the camp. Depicting the silhouette of a woman stirring or retrieving food from a pot with a spoon, the pendant refers to Perlman’s highly coveted position as a worker in the kitchens (Fig. 6). The pendant’s focus on the generative act of cooking implicitly refers to survival through the body’s reliance on food, a hard-won reward in a camp-ghetto where tens of thousands died from malnutrition and starvation. Separate pendants such as a three-dimensionally shaped miniature spoon and pot serve as supporting characters to this larger pendant, again referencing the tools needed for survival and nourishment (Fig. 7).

Far from depicting a lower-class occupation, as kitchen work would have typically been categorized in European society of the time, the prized nature of the occupation in Terezín meant that the bracelet’s multiple references to Perlman’s work attested to her high value and status within the camp-ghetto social stratum. Labor was not only inextricably tied to one’s status and position, but thought of as a “moral” activity, part of a larger “master narrative” of Terezín generated by the inmate community where every prisoner contributed to the community to the best of his or her ability, despite persecution and incarceration by the Nazis. This master narrative framed the Terezín community as a cultural and collective triumph of the human spirit, with its incredible production of cultural activity and little crime between inmates.12 Perlman’s occupation as a cook was considered to be of crucial service to the community, and the pride she likely felt in her role led her to reference it multiple times in her bracelet. If she traded food from the kitchens in exchange for these customized pendants, she may have also thought of her occupation as a way to support others in the community. Perlman’s occupation in the kitchens affirmed her social belonging within the fabric of Terezín, and her pendants serve, both in content and production, as visual evidence and remnant of that social belonging.

Further endorsing her identification with the Terezín community, Perlman’s identification number “M433” is the most repeated symbol on the bracelet, inscribed on or carved into four of the pendants. Although three instances are easily discernible, one appears covertly: in the pendant described earlier of a woman cooking food, the pot and the flames form the shape of Perlman’s identification number “M433” (numbers shown inverted in Fig. 6). The merger of the image with the text of Perlman’s identification number adds a disturbing and compelling dimension to the bracelet. Creation, through the form of food, literally emerges or is produced by Perlman’s identification number, in its shape of pot and fire. The pendant suggests both Perlman’s small acts of agency within an environment defined by her status and confinement as a prisoner, but also her social capital as a worker within the kitchens.

The predominance of identification numbers throughout Perlman’s bracelet, and in jewelry objects later examined in this essay, seems to suggest that, while designed and perpetuated for dehumanizing purposes, prisoner identification numbers inscribed on jewelry by prisoners, for prisoners, held multifaceted meanings and connections. Prisoners possibly repurposed the identification numbers within jewelry as a lens to record and understand their experiences. Seen from a post-Holocaust perspective, one can interpret the prisoner identification number, seen alongside a multitude of initials, names, and other images across Perlman’s bracelet, as one facet among many of the incarceration experience. To prisoners, these symbols, and by extension the experiences they signify, were to be confronted and remembered. If this bracelet was lost or separated from Perlman, the pendants’ multiple references to both her name and her identification number indelibly affirm the bracelet’s true owner, and by extension, Perlman’s existence.

• 12
  Hájková, The Last Ghetto, 67.

Across Terezín jewelry, a set of double doors appears multiple times as a symbol of freedom and confinement, likely referring to one of the actual entrances of Terezín. In Perlman’s bracelet, a pair of double doors opens to a hidden panel inscribed with her name and identification number (Fig. 8). One finds two similar doors in a trio of pendants commissioned for the Picková family while they were imprisoned at Terezín, now held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York (Fig. 9). 13 Constructed by fellow prisoner, opera-singer, and trained jewelry maker David Grunfeld, these pendants were part of a series of metal objects made by Grunfeld for the Picková family. 14 Museum database information records that Marie Picková, the mother and wife of the family, had joined an underground group at Terezín which smuggled food packages into the camp, suggesting that Grunfeld may have made these items in exchange for more food, similar to the potential exchanges between Perlman and the artisans of her metal bracelet. In Grunfeld’s pin of three pendants, the rightmost pendant depicts one door in its entirety, adding a small attachment in the shape of a lock, while the second door appears more covertly in the leftmost pendant of Terezín’s coat of arms (Fig. 10).

• 13
  All jewelry objects made by David Grunfeld for the Picková family and discussed in this essay were donated to the Leo Baeck Institute in 2020 by Zuzana Justman, the daughter of Marie Picková.
• 14
  For other objects made by David Grunfeld for the Picková family at Terezín, see “Star of David charm worn by Zuzana Justman in Theresienstadt”, Leo Baeck Institute, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/5566867; “Locket with a Photo of Viktor Pick”, Leo Baeck Institute, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/5566868; and “Heart Charm Made for Zuzana Justman”, Leo Baeck Institute, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/5567287.

There are strong formal similarities between the door pendants of Perlman’s bracelet and those that Grunfeld constructed for the Picková family: both have diagonal markings indicating wooden panels, and an irregular outline suggesting a stone wall surrounding the doors. In the background of a photograph taken of the arrival of Jews from Holland to Terezín on January 20, 1944, one can glimpse the source for the pendants’ iconography: Terezín’s entrance, with its two double doors with diagonal markings, and the large blocks of the fortress’s walls surrounding it (Fig. 11).

What can we make of the door that appears repeatedly in Terezín jewelry? A powerful image of both entrance into, and exit out of the camp, the doors represent both confinement and the possible promise of freedom. The lock attached to the right pendant of Grunfeld’s pin underlines Terezín’s purpose as a site of imprisonment. Meanwhile, the right pendant of Grunfeld’s pin is modeled after Terezín’s coat of arms, featuring a lion between two towers above the walls of the fortress.15 The inclusion of the door in Terezín’s coat of arms, the most representative visual symbol of the site as a whole, underscores the door as critical to understanding Terezín: a place of fraught entrance and exit. The repeating appearance of the door in different pieces of Terezín jewelry shapes a shared visual language of the ghetto-camp experience using a symbol grounded in the physical and specifically-situated experience of confinement at the site. The motif conveys both the anxiety of captivity and a sense of social belonging, a collective grouping, through mutual experience.

The text engraved inside or on the verso of these door pendants adds another dimension to the objects’ reaffirmation of ownership and, by extension, personhood. Perlman’s double doors can be opened to a panel engraved with her full name and identification number, capturing her dual identity as both individual and prisoner. This literal manner of communicating her presence inside the doors of Terezín encourages physical engagement with the object and, via that engagement, discovery—by opening the doors, one can uncover Greta in both name and identification number.

• 15
  Norbert Troller, Theresienstadt/Terezín Coat of Arms, ca. 1942, See “Theresienstadt/Terezin : Coat of Arms : original sketch”, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/248676.

A second site with a significant amount of jewelry production was the Łódź ghetto of Poland, which housed 163,000 residents as the second-largest ghetto in all Nazi-occupied Europe when its gates closed in April 1940. The ghetto was a site where Nazis were able, despite suspicion and rumors among ghetto inhabitants, to prevent full knowledge of the Final Solution through a combination of well-sealed borders, limited correspondence with the outside world, and deliberate lies and misinformation. The objects discussed in this essay serve as testimonials to the real conditions of the ghetto, to the strength of the relationships inmates cultivated in their isolation from the outside world, and to the community’s complex relationship to labor in the ghetto as a means of survival and exploitation.

Unlike Terezín, where limited information on metal workshops and their operations exists, more information about the possible contexts of production of objects exists from the Łódź ghetto because of the site’s status as a major industrial center manufacturing war supplies for the Nazi military. The massive growth of the ghetto industry was motivated, in part, by Łódź ghetto leader Chaim Rumkowski’s promotion of his “rescue through labor” ideology. This growth was further exacerbated by a labor shortage that became ever more apparent in Germany and other occupied territories. By January 1944, 92.6 percent of the ghetto’s population was engaged in labor.17

The metal workshop alone served as a significant center of ghetto labor, with the proportion of Jews from the ghetto employed in this sector growing from 0.8 percent in 1931 to 7.1 percent in 1944.18 Isaiah Trunk has described the metal workshop as “mechanizing” the entire ghetto industry, with many sub-branches of the metalworking sector in operation, including repairs, foundry, smithy, and various production of tools.19 Although information regarding the ownership and artisanal identity of most objects from the Łódź ghetto remains sparse, it is likely that the jewelry pieces were created with excess or spare materials from these workshops.

In spite of its role as a major industrial center manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany, the majority of the population of the ghetto was transported to extermination camps by 1944, where most were murdered upon arrival. Eight hundred ghetto inmates were ordered to remain in the ghetto after its liquidation to clean and salvage materials and dig mass graves. Among the inmates who remained behind were Malwina Gerson and Szmul Brasz, who found the majority of Łódź ghetto jewelry pieces discussed in this essay and later donated them to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem of Jerusalem, Israel, respectively.20 Among the objects they found were three link bracelets. Although who made these objects, and for whom, remains unknown, all three items clearly held sentimental importance to their original owners, and their complexity and size comparative to the pendants from Terezín document testify to a breadth and diversity of ghetto experiences rarely seen in other Holocaust-era jewelry pieces (Fig. 13).

• 17
  Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 157.
• 18
  Ibid., 158.
• 19
  Ibid., 150.
• 20
  Unknown, “Link bracelet made in the Łódź ghetto, depicting scenes of ghetto life”, Artifacts, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/collection/ 5419500; Unknown, “Link bracelet depicting scenes of life in the Łódź ghetto”, Artifacts, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/collection/ 8636939; and Unknown, “Brass bracelet with cutout designs of scenes of daily life made in Łódź Ghetto”, Malwinka (Inka) Gerson Allen Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 26, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn518796.

The bracelets are composed of five links, each depicting an individual scene of daily life weaving narratives of labor and everyday survival. All three bracelets include an image of men drawing wagons with supplies; a guard near a fence, two of which feature a sign with the words indicating the Jewish headquarters within the ghetto written in German; and a bridge adjacent to a tower structure. Two of the bracelets contain a scene of a man retrieving water from a well. Two separate metal brooches, also found among the ruins of the Łódź ghetto, share these visual elements: the bridge and tower motif, men bringing in food through wagons, a guard near a fence, and the sign of the Jewish headquarters (Figs. 14 and 15).21 The similarity between these scenes, despite the link bracelets and pins likely being manufactured by different artisans, suggests a shared visual language employed by artisans to represent the Łódź ghetto experience, similar to how the image of the Terezín doors is repeated throughout jewelry from that site.

• 21
  Unknown, “Pin with depiction of the Łódź ghetto found by Szmul Brasz among the ghetto ruins”, Artifacts, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, accessed May 26, 2025, https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/artifacts/8636830; and Unknown, “Brooch with a cut-out design of the fence and Jewish quarters sign made in Łódź ghetto”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., accessed May 26, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn518795.

Across all jewelry pieces, their scenes center the experience of labor. Unlike the pendants from Terezín discussed earlier, which largely reduce experiences to static symbols, the link bracelets’ scenes are presented on the same horizontal plane and connected by the same decorative border, conjuring several different active characters within a variety of settings. The structure of the link bracelets literally “chains” together these scenes of labor, confinement, and surveillance. Simultaneously, the frequent appearance of fences and bridges within all three link bracelets enforce a constant sense of boundaries, limitations, and separation.

The Łódź link bracelets’ frequent depiction of labor (drawing water from wells, bringing in food from wagons) also reveals how central and pressing labor was to the ghetto population, especially as pushed by ghetto administration leaders such as Chaim Rumkowski. According to Rumkowski’s program, labor was one of the chief pillars on which the ghetto based its existence, a principle which he emphasized in numerous public appearances.25 Labor thus held a kind of moral quality as the survival of the community depended on it; workers frequently reported their colleagues to supervisors if they perceived as not working hard enough. The link bracelets depict a community in labor as a demonstration of moral fiber, adaptability, and endurance.

Simultaneously, the portrayals of labor in the link bracelets also remind us of the futility and bitter irony of the Nazi slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Free), which was notoriously written above the gates of several concentration camp. Despite their labor, the Łódź ghetto prisoners were not free, and indeed, although the makers and commissioners of these pieces could not know it, their labor would not ultimately save the community as Rumkowski had envisioned and hoped. At the same time, despite the ultimate failure of the ghetto’s moral ethos of labor, the depictions of intense toil presented alongside the carved Jewish headquarters sign defy Nazi ideology’s description of Jews as lacking the qualities of self-sacrifice and productivity necessary to contribute to a greater nation-state.26 Although the labor depicted in the Łódź ghetto jewelry pieces did not save the ghetto community, it is still the communal labor of a community defiantly proclaiming Jewish resilience and the fight for survival in the face of racist Nazi messaging.

Given that the owners and artisans of the link bracelets and brooches are unknown, the motives behind their production cannot be pinpointed with absolutely certainty, though two of the bracelets’ potential purpose as marriage commemoration bracelets suggest that they were commissioned by an inmate from a fellow inmate-artisan in exchange for food or other resources. A second series of brooches, all confirmed or likely created by the Łódź ghetto metal artisan Chaim Klieger, demonstrate a recorded instance of the transactional nature underlying the production of metal jewelry objects. Yad Vashem records that the Klieger family owned and operated two workshops in the Łódź ghetto, manufacturing wool socks and metalwork, respectively. Using the raw materials gleaned from aircraft pieces and other bits of metal, Klieger would make small items such as combs, brooches, and medallions, and barter these items in exchange for food.

Klieger was known for his elaborately detailed brooches mimicking the appearance of Łódź ghetto food ration cards, with the names and identification numbers of their owners carved to imitate cursive or printed fonts. Three existing brooches of this type have been found, either donated by their owners or found in the ruins of concentration camps such as Birkenau-Auschwitz: one made for Klieger’s sister Sara Klieger and is now held in Yad Vashem; a second brooch was issued for a woman named “Bela Bialer” and is now held in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and a third brooch was for “Hinda Weiksel” and is now held in the Foundation of Memory Sites near Auschwitz-Birkenau (Fig. 17).27 Notably, the third brooch contains an inscription on the back reading, “To dear Heli on our VI wedding anniversary. Pawel,” with a date “August 15, 1937-1943.”28 Like the two link bracelets described earlier, this brooch also commemorates a marriage anniversary. It was likely commissioned by the prisoner Pawel Weiksel for his wife. Although the exact reason behind the representation of food ration card is unknown, their imitation undoubtedly served as a demonstration of Klieger’s technical skills, and, like Perlman’s miniature “tools,” they were perhaps seen as a physical demonstration of social and economic capital on the part of their owners due to their “frivolous” nature, while also holding sentimental value.

• 25
  Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 159. At one public appearance during an exhibition opening, Rumkowski reportedly emotionally declared, “Our children and grandchildren will recall with pride the names of all those who assisted in the creation of the most important positions of Jewry in the ghetto—by their work opportunities that gave them entitlement to life and existence.”
• 26
  Oren Baruch Steir, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 73.
• 27
  Chaim Klieger, Silver brooch made for artisan’s sister Sara, see “Small Mementos from the Lodz Ghetto”, Artifacts on Display at the Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/museum/mementos-lodz.html;(Suspected) Chaim Klieger, Metal brooch designed in imitation of ration card issued to Bela Bialer, see “Metal brooch designed in imitation of the ration card issued to Bela Bialer in the Lodz ghetto. The pin mimics the signature of Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Lodz ghetto Judenrat”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., accessed May 26, 2025, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1103562; and “Ghetto-Crafted Brooch with Husband’s Message Recovered near Auschwitz,” The Times of Israel, November 21, 2017, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/museum/mementos-lodz.html.
• 28
  Ghetto-Crafted Brooch”, The Times of Israel, accessed May 26, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/museum/mementos-lodz.html.

Although some scholarship frames the production of theater, music, and the visual arts in Holocaust-era ghettos and camps as “strategies for survival,” other scholars refute the Holocaust narrative of “culture as resistance,” suggesting that inmates engaged in cultural activities and production for various different reasons.29 Inmates noted that cultural life “made them feel better,” with artistic creation serving as both a reminder of individuality in dehumanizing conditions and a way to stave off boredom.30 Although the objects described in this essay likely shared some of these reasons for their production, certain elements also separate Holocaust-era jewelry from other artistic mediums and offer an alternative look into the social, cultural, and economic operations of the camp.

Perhaps more so than Holocaust-era theatrical and musical performances or the visual documentation of the camps through drawings, the creation of jewelry objects examined in this essay was motivated less as a form of protest or resistance, and more as an example of these sites’ transactional economies. Artisans could exchange jewelry for material resources, while purchasers of the pieces used them to assert individuality, ownership, and status within the social and cultural contexts of the camps. Given the economic factors underlying their creation, many of Holocaust-era jewelry objects perhaps were a “strategy for survival” for artisans, although how critical they were as a resource for artisans’ sustenance and livelihood is unclear and deserves more research. Regardless, these objects demonstrate how the social and economic hierarchies of the inmate communities impacted the cultural life of the camps. Through their production and content, these jewelry pieces offer testimony to the power structures and values held by society in the Terezín and Łódź ghettos, particularly in relation to marriage and labor, and how Jews incarcerated in ghettos and camps persisted in intellectual and artistic production.

• 29
  For interpretations of artistic production as “strategies for survival,” see Mary Costanza, The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos (New York: Free Press, 1982), 18 and Marjorie Lamberti, “Making Art in the Terezín Concentration Camp,” New England Review 17, no. 4 (1995): 104-111. See Hájková, The Last Ghetto, 174 for refutation of “culture as resistance” narrative.
• 30
  Hájková, The Last Ghetto, 174.

Acknowledgements: This research would not have been possible without the support of the Jewish Museum located in New York City, where I was assigned this project as a Blanksteen Curatorial Intern. I would like to give my deepest thanks to the Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator Darsie Alexander, who assigned the project to me; the Morris and Eva Feld Senior Curator Claudia Nahson, whose prior research on Greta Perlman’s bracelet served as an invaluable foundation of information; and the Leon Levy Assistant Curator Kristina Parsons, who gave continual advice through moments of roadblock while researching and served as my supervisor during the internship.

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated; they also wrote to a relative, Ludwik, whom they hoped might deliver Dziunia’s letter. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper, a list no larger than 11 x 15 cm.  

The first letter to Ludwik reads:  

Ludwik! We have waited all day yesterday next to the gate where you have seen young Ritter. I and Maria are on the official Judenrat [Jewish Council] list and have with us the official numbers. We found ourselves here accidentally. Ludwik, please do what you can. Come out for a moment to see us! We are waiting! We have money. Ludwik, we beg you. If there is no return for us, take care of Dziunia. We are the only ones she has left. Max and Maria.1   

The second, partially coded letter to Dziunia reads: 

When you will have to sell anything ask Recks for advice . . .

Dear Dziunius! Obviously this is our fate. Dziunius, be brave and cope. Collect everything from Halber and sell gradually. At the office, there are 2 rucksacks and father’s coat, second at home. There is food in the rucksacks and in the oven. Collect everything. Butter is in the wardrobe. Dziunius, farewell and go courageously into life! Regards for all. 

• 1
  I would like to thank Zofia Glowacka for checking the English-language translations of the letters. 

The size of the two letters and the reuse of scraps of paper speak to the desperation, violence, and urgency of the genocidal context in which they were penned as well as the severe material shortages in the ghetto. The letters did reach their intended recipient, Dziunia, who survived, although their courier, Ludwik, did not. When he learned later that his wife and daughter were also taken to the Umschlagplatz, he tried to intervene on their behalf. After he was told he could see them, he was selected for deportation too.  

The archive of the Wiener Holocaust Library has become the letters’ final resting place, their storage in acid-free and water-protective folders and boxes speaking to the continued reverence with which Holocaust-related flat objects (documentation) are treated by archivists and conservators, and our ability to access them, interpret them and respond to them through their preservation.2 The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is one of the oldest institutions continuously collecting on the Nazi period and the Holocaust. The Library was founded in 1933 by its namesake, the German Jewish scholar and activist, Dr. Alfred Wiener, as he recognized the dangers posed by the Nazi Party and their allies and began collecting and disseminating information to undermine their activities. In 1933, Wiener moved these efforts to Amsterdam and created the Library’s predecessor organization, the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO), to continue gathering documentation and to launch information campaigns to fight the Nazis. After the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) of November 1938, Wiener and the JCIO moved again, this time to London, where the institution has remained in operation through today. It has served as a library of record for ninety years and is home to the largest collection of Holocaust-related documentation and published works in the United Kingdom. Among these are a significant number of personal document collections, which include tens of thousands of pages of personal correspondence exchanged before, during, and after the Holocaust. This includes the Wortman letters. 

Thanks to Mike Stratton, a family friend of Dziunia’s and the donor of these pages, we know more about their afterlife, the paths the letters traveled to the archive, and the material connectivity between the writers, the courier, the recipients, the donor, and the archive. Dziunia interprets the letter her parents sent her in a transcribed interview, kept and donated by Stratton, along with her documents:  

My parents were trying to tell [Ludwik] that they had money, that maybe he could do something to get them out of the train. You see, my father writes here that they are on the official list and that they have a number. If you had a number you thought that you were safe at the time and that you could do something. . . . That’s my mother’s writing. When you look at these letters, from those few words you could see that my mother was the stronger one. The way she writes, her hope always was for me. She tells me to be brave and tells me certain things, where the money was (she calls it masło, or butter in English). She comes up much stronger, but in real life she was the quieter one of the two. My father was very boisterous. But out of this comes her courage, she was stronger. She knew what was going to happen because she tells me to be brave. 

Dziunia did not wish to part with the letters during her lifetime, and as Stratton recalled, “she always kept these letters on her—they were the soul and spirit of her parents.” Both she and Stratton understood the potential sacrality of the letters for the recipient as well as for future readers of these objects. She reminded Stratton that he was the executor of her will, and that it was for him to decide their ultimate fate after her death. In her interview she recounts nearly becoming separated from the letters:  

For many years I always had them on me, wherever I went. If I changed my handbag, I always kept these things with me. For some reason, I don’t know why, one day I took the things out and left them at home. A few days later my handbag was stolen. Somebody walked in here, into the house, and stole the handbag. Just about two or three days before I had taken those letters out. Isn’t it strange? 

Dziunia engaged the letters in a kind of haptic veneration, imbuing them with a visceral sacrality that required their being physically close at all times. The fact that their oft-used holder, her handbag, was stolen just after she removed the letters adds to the uncanny significance of her need for physical proximity to the letters, as a kind of stand-in for her parents. The need for proximity makes sense, since the letters are saturated with the last traces of her parents’ hands, the words they wrote on these scraps of paper, but then over time, imbued with her own presence, the way she continued to hold, read, and touch these pages over and over again from when Ludwik passed the letters to her in 1942 until her death in October 2015. As handwritten documents, the letters speak to a material intimacy between the writers and their recipient, and in their immediacy and bodily traces, stand in actual and metaphoric opposition to the vast amounts of state and privately produced, bureaucratic documentation that undergirded the mass expropriation, deportation, and murder of millions of victims.3

The meanings attributed to these letters did not end, however, with Dziunia’s death or their storage in the archive. Through preservation, translation, curation, and display for the public, they took on new interpretation and meaning in 2023. I consider letters as objects, and understand that their afterlives, as Laura Levitt notes, “help us make meaning as they transform the profane into the sacred."4 These letters had been displayed and interpreted in the Holocaust Letters temporary exhibition at The Wiener Holocaust Library in 2023, which I co-curated with Sandra Lipner. While personal letters are very often featured in Holocaust and other exhibitions, including those held at the Library, letters, postal history, and letter-writing during the Holocaust are rarely a singular focus as such of Holocaust exhibitions.5 The exhibition focused on letters from the Library’s archive derived from its personal document collections, which were often preserved in the first instance by refugees and survivors who had migrated to the United Kingdom and who eventually entrusted the Library with their collections.6 The exhibition had two main curatorial themes that drove our choices: knowledge production and materiality. We explored how private correspondence written before, during, and after the Holocaust became sites of knowledge production, as well as how the materiality of letters reveals deeper meanings about their content and the mediation of archives in the production of knowledge. By curating and displaying personal, both typewritten and handwritten letters, the exhibition explored notions of authenticity, uniqueness, and voice.7 The Wortman letters had never before been displayed in one of the Library’s many temporary exhibitions, and Sandra and I chose them from among thousands and thousands of pages of letters in the Library’s collections because we wanted to emphasize the importance of reading the materiality of letters (and their afterlives) as much as the words written on paper in order to access multiple layers of meaning held by objects. The curators aimed to reinforce the unique nature of individual stories, with a main underlying curatorial message to emphasize the importance of private letters as a source for research and as “tangible markers of conflict experience and, by association, as carriers of memory” in similar ways to photographs and other personal objects.8 Unlike photographs and personal objects, letters “carry voice through time and space.”9

Moreover, as curators, we recognized and built our work on a significant body of new epistolary-centered academic research, both from within the field of Holocaust and Jewish studies, as well as in other historical eras, and from many different disciplinary, methodological, and thematic perspectives—including material culture and literary studies, anthropology, digital humanities, philatelic and postal history, and so on.10 Therefore, the exhibition built on scholarship on the history of knowledge as well as on letters as a source, and positioned letters as objects, a somewhat contested notion in the literature.11  The exhibition queried how the visual and physical features of letters, as well as their safeguarding, contribute to our understanding of these as sites of knowledge production and as objects in their own right. In the words of Zuzanna Dziuban and Ewa Stańczyk, we approached the letters as “surviving things” that “remain imbued with affect, permeated with memories (both actual and constructed), and burdened with conflicting narratives of the past.”12  

The Wortman letters provide a window onto the multiple aims of the exhibition and our curatorial questions, and the Interrogating the Sacred workshop helped frame my further thinking about these letters following the conclusion of the exhibition. In addition to their materiality, we also selected the Wortman letters for the exhibition because their content and physical characteristics speak of urgency and desperation, as well as tremendous love and care in extremis. They were among the few letters displayed written in Polish (much of the Library’s collection is in German, due to its history as an institution borne of forced migration from pre-war Nazi Germany). Yet, mirroring in many ways the discussions we had with conservators at the USHMM workshop, this evocative materiality also presented us with challenges for display—the paper is very fragile, with messages written on both sides, and due to the limitations of the display case and need for security and conservation protections, we couldn’t devise a mechanism for allowing visitors to simply handle them and turn them over. Because we wanted to ensure that visitors could examine their markings, size, and both sides as closely and safely (for the letters) as possible, we worked with Easy Tiger Creative to develop a display method that showed the reverse side etched onto a light acrylic base, which was backlit within a locked glass case (Fig. 4). This display base for the letters, which also held their translations, was simple, unadorned, and presented no distraction from other objects in the case. It was the only set of letters displayed on their own in a case, although the exhibition itself contained hundreds of pages of letters. The framing interpretive panel discussed how remarkably precise Holocaust knowledge emerged from letters people wrote to each other even before the terms “Holocaust” or “genocide” were applied. We told the story of the letters’ writing at the Umschlagplatz briefly near the letters and left the interpretive rail purposefully blank—allowing the letters the “space” needed for close inspection, reflection, further interpretation, meaning making, and even wonder. 

• 2
  This discussion is prompted by Laura Levitt’s The Objects that Remain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). The author is grateful to the co-convenors (Levitt and Oren Stier) and participants of the lively and thought-provoking two-week workshop, Interrogating the Sacred at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
• 3
   See, for example, the millions of pages of largely bureaucratic documentation held in the International Tracing Service archive, now known as the Arolsen Archives.
• 4
  Levitt, The Objects That Remain, 123. My analysis of these letters was further developed through the Interrogating the Sacred workshop. I am thinking here in particular of the close perspectives the workshop’s participants gained of conservation principles and practices, their particular malleability and responsiveness to various conditions and circumstances, wonderfully presented by the USHMM’s team as well as USHMM Chief Conservator Jane Klinger, and the inherent tensions and balances needed between conservation, research, display, and interpretation. Through the two weeks of tours, intense discussions, and incisive group reflections, the workshop reinforced the need for close collaborative work built on significant trust among those who handle or otherwise engage with Holocaust objects: object donors and their families, heritage practitioners, curators, archivists, collections managers, conservators, researchers, educators, and so on. The workshop helped reinforce and deepen my understanding of letters as objects, and the multitude of meanings carried in their materiality. 
• 5
  Often framed as the last tangible links between victims, as forms of resistance, or descriptions of displacement and survival, letters exceptionally formed the basis of Yad Vashem’s virtual exhibition series Last Letters, see here (last accessed 6 March 2024). For a helpful discussion of the display of handwritten texts in museums, see Chaim Noy, “Voices on display: Handwriting, paper, and authenticity, from museums to social network sites,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 26, no. 5-6 (2019): 1-18. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for recommending Noy’s work.
• 6
  Howard Falksohn, “The Wiener Library: A Repository of Schicksale,” in Refugee Archives: Theory and Practice, ed. Andrea Hammel and Anthony Grenville (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27-40. 
• 7
  Noy, “Voices on display,” 4.
• 8
  Zuzanna Dziuban and Ewa Stańczyk, “Introduction: The Surviving Thing: Personal Objects in the Aftermath of Violence,” Journal of Material Culture 24, no. 4 (December 2020): 381-390.
• 9
  Noy, “Voices on display,” 5.
• 10
  See,  for example, Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Shirli Gilbert, “A Cache of Family Letters and the Historiography of the Holocaust: Interpretive Reflections,” The Journal of Holocaust Research 36, no. 4 (2021): 281-298, and Shirli Gilbert, From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009); Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, eds. Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). For a complete bibliography on which the scholarship of the exhibition was drawn, see here.
• 11
  Peter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); on “flat” objects, see Lea David, “A Shoe, a Broken Watch, and Marbles: How Objects Shape our Memory and Future,” Wiener Wiesenthal Institute Lecture, Vienna, 28 April 2022, and Raul Hilberg, Chapter 1, “Types of Sources,” in Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2001).
• 12
  Dziuban and Stańczyk, “Introduction,” 381.

The Wortman letters also embodied in many ways my own affective reaction to their contents and afterlife: to the plight of parents separated brutally from their child before facing a violent unknown, and to Dziunia’s legacy of grappling with her mother’s courage in that moment, which upon reflection, revealed to her the quiet strength she had demonstrated throughout her life. The thought of saying goodbye to a child as they face the unknown with a slim hope that she would survive is nearly impossible and utterly unbearable to imagine.  

While on display, the letters took on further new meanings alongside correspondence drafted in different contexts and often similarly extreme circumstances: ordinary or insignificant objects rendered extraordinary.13 The letters make visceral the story of Dziunia’s parents, their care for her even in the face of death. These documents traveled an incredible journey from the Umschlagplatz to Dziunia and continued with her over a lifetime as she escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, was transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, liberated, and emigrated to England following the war. The letters came to the Wiener Holocaust Library. Among the many other documents we have displayed in exhibitions at the Library, these letters made explicit how important personal Holocaust-era documents are as witnesses to lives lived, destroyed, and cherished. I realize now more keenly than I did then that these tiny fragments of fragile paper hold the last traces of those lives.  

• 13
  Leora Auslander, “Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies,” in Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2010), 139.

“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.

• 1
  Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2-3 (2015): 234.

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.

• 2
  Acasta gneiss is one of the oldest terrestrial rock formations dating back over 4 billon years covering over 300,000 km of Northwestern Canada.

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. 

• 3
  For an in-depth study of the chronological history of bannerstones see David L. Lutz, The Archaic Bannerstone: Its Chronological History and Purpose from 6000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. (Newburg: David L. Lutz, 2000).
• 4
  Tristam R. Kidder, “Trend, Tradition and Transition at the end of the Archaic,” in Trend, tradition, and turmoil, ed. David Hurst Thomas and Matthew C. Sanger (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 2010), 23ff.
  
  For the dating of Indigenous communities at the Indian Knoll site see Darcy F. Morey, George M. Crothers, Julie K. Stein, James P. Fenton, and Nicolas P. Herrmann, “The Fluvial and Geomorphic Context of Indian Knoll, an Archaic Shell Midden in West-Central Kentucky,” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 17, no. 6 (2002): 521. They propose 6000BP-3000BP (4,050 BC-1,050 BC) for the dates of Archaic period occupancy at Indian Knoll.

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.

• 5
  This bannerstone was found in Glenn Falls, Warren County, New York. The stone was purchased from M. F. Savage on June 13th, 1888, for $12.00 (by A. E. Douglass and donated to the AMNH in 1901. Source AMNH digital database. This was a high price at the time when most bannerstones could be bought for one or two dollars.
• 6
  According to Adrienne Mayor “the care taken to highlight the trace fossil suggests that the bannerstone maker may have viewed the worm/snake shape as a being from the deep past, a creature so old that it was transformed to stone. The ripple pattern of the sediments around the white shape may have evoked a water creature.” Personal communication February 24, 2025. For a book length study of Indigenous knowledge of fossils see: Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton University Press, 2025).

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

• 7
  Native bamboo of the Arundinaria genus grows wild in moist forested mountains or along rivers of Eastern North America. Arundinaria appalachiana is hill cane, Arundinaria gigantea is river cane, and Arundinaria tecta is switch cane.
• 8
  Unfinished bannerstones would have been less fragile and safer for travel and trade, able to be completed at any time. Sassaman proposed that these bannerstones were traded north, west, and south of the Savannah River Valley where they were made. See Kenneth E. Sassaman, “Crafting Cultural Identity in Hunter-Gatherer Economies,” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 8, no. 1 (2008): 100-101.
• 9
  Clarence H. Webb, “The Poverty Point Culture,” in Geoscience and Man, vol. 17 (Baton Rouge: School of Geoscience, Louisiana State University, 1977), 47-49.
• 10
  Kenneth E. Sassaman, The Eastern Archaic Historicized (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 59.

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

• 15
  Knoblock created an elaborate typology of bannerstone forms choosing names that were either purely descriptive such as “triangular” to names that were both descriptive of bannerstone shapes as well as indicative of locations where these shapes were most often found such as “Wisconsin Wing.” See Knoblock, Banner-stones of the North American Indian, 149-171. For this essay I have used the twenty-four core types Knoblock created to name bannerstones. This streamlined typology can be found here.

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.

• 17
  United States National Parks Services, NPS Archeology Program: The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), see here.
• 18
  Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Regulations, Part 10, Subpart A, see here.
• 19
  “William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology,” University of Kentucky, accessed 02/15/2024. See here.
• 20
  “Indian Treaties and the Removal Act of 1830,” Office of The Historian, Department of State, United States of America, accessed 02/15/2024. See here.
  May 28, 1830 Statute I. Chapter CXLVIII (148) “An Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states of territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi,” accessed 01/15/2025. See here.
• 21
  Armand Minthorn, “Human Remains Should be Reburied,” Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (September 1996). See here.
  
  Kristi Paulus, “Kennewick Man finally buried by local tribes,” KEPR (February 20, 2017). See here.

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.

• 22
  See the Bannerstone Project here. Though the provenance of most bannerstones is anecdotal, based on the spoken record of the people who found them, we have created a map on the website that lights up their presumed location spread out across the Northeast. Of the 121 bannerstones on this website, all are currently in storage, none are on display.

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.

• 25
  Since 2016 I have worked with Joseph Anderson, Digital Initiatives Librarian who developed the online format of the Bannerstone Project; Molly Schoen, Visual Resources Curator who transferred and edited all the metadata; and Nanja Andriananjason, who edited all the images on the Bannerstone Project website.
  
  The photographs removed correspond to AMNH D/142, D/144, D/146, D/147; NMNH A61057, A61058, and A61059. Rather than erasing them, we have chosen to leave their catalog numbers on the site indicating with an explanation text that they have been removed for a reason. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries when bannerstones were being actively collected the AMNH lent to the Smithsonian (NMNH) five of the bannerstones that Douglass had excavated in 1882. While in DC plaster casts were made of these stones and kept in the collection. Since these casts represent the originals, we have chosen to remove photographs of them as well as photographs of the original stones in hopes of discussing with tribal members the delicate terms and conditions of representation.
• 26
  A. E. Douglass, “A Find of Ceremonial Axes," The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 4 (1882): 103. And though Douglass did not find any sign of human remains in this mound, subsequent excavations have found several human burials within different areas. See Jon C. Endonino, Tomoka Archaeology Project Stage 1: Mapping and Excavation at the Tomoka Mound and Midden Complex (8VO81) Volusia County, Florida (Richmond, KY: EKU Archaeology Laboratory, Eastern Kentucky University), March 2019.

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.

• 27
  TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection,” 232-233.
• 28
  Ibid.
• 29
  Details about where these hammer stones and this piece Chi Fii Embraces the Old Ones were shared with me in conversation with Audie Murray on June 21, 2024.
• 30
  Audie Murray, “Dream,” in Pawatamihk: Audie Murray (Nanaimo: Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2021). See here.

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.