Can birdstones sing? Rethinking material-semiotic approaches in contemporary archaeological theory

ABSTRACT

Birdstones are an enigmatic and diverse group of objects found across eastern North America with concentrations around the Great Lakes region. Via speculative interpretations of form, analogical comparison with other regions, and consideration of basic contextual information, archaeologists think of birdstones as parts of canoes, flutes, unspecified ceremonial assemblages, and, most frequently, atlatls. Discourse and debate about birdstones largely neglects issues of material vibrancy and semiotic process, including the processes by which archaeologists and others began to name and typify these objects in the late nineteenth century. This paper rethinks birdstones through a ‘more than representational’ approach that combines assemblage theory with Peircean semiotics. Although both lines of thought align with relational ontologies, non-representational critiques, and post-anthropocentrism, archaeologists rarely consider the two together. This approach helps us chart how birdstones emerged and evolved through a complicated set of human-nonhuman interactions that continue into the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Birdstones
• North American archaeology
• archaeological theory
• representation

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for offering constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this article and to Katherine Dunnell for offering us helpful advice on geological taxonomies. We also thank the Royal Ontario Museum for granting permission to reproduce photographs of the birdstones. Tiziana Gallo’s research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Only 18 (14.5%) birdstones in the analysed collection bear tally marks. Most of these include between 2-50 marks each, but one stone has 146 marks; these high numbers seem to disprove the ‘princes’ theory.

2. Interestingly, two of these rare, left-eyed birdstones were found on the same lot.

3. It is probable that some of this wear resulted from nineteenth and early twentieth-century collecting and curation practices, but the majority seems to relate to ancient patterns of use. Besides macroscopically-identifiable and freshly-made scars and striations, the documentation of recent wear in the shape of micro-polish and micro-striations is beyond the scope of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Craig N. Cipolla

Craig N. Cipolla is Vettoretto Curator of North American Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Tiziana Gallo

Tiziana Gallo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Toronto.