Three Little Birds: Reassembling Typological Thought

Abstract

The typologies that archaeologists use to classify artefacts and situate them chronologically and culturally are crucial tools of the discipline; when left unquestioned, however, they tend to produce reductive and essentializing understandings of the past. Like all theoretical interventions, assemblage theory questions the unquestioned, in this case, asking archaeologists to radically rethink the relationality of the world and the power and vibrancy of nonhuman and nonliving things like stone. In this article, we take an assemblage-based approach to an old typological problem – sorting birdstones. Since the mid-19th century, collectors and archaeologists categorized birdstones found throughout the American Northeast according to evolutionary or culture-historical principles. These approaches paid little attention to different varieties of stone, often regarding birdstones as if they were passive reflections of normative mindsets that came in only three culture-specific types. Here, we explore how archaeologists might ‘reassemble’ typological thought, analysing and thinking through a large sample of materially varied birdstones to find much more than three little birds. Recognizing how the shared and specific capacities of different stones actively contributed to the multiplicity of birdstone morphologies resituates them as singular and changing assemblages while highlighting the potentials of questioning the fixity of both typological and material categories at large.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editorial staff of Norwegian Archaeological Review, two anonymous peer reviewers for offering helpful suggestions on how to improve the article, and Dr Justin Jennings and April Hawkins of the Royal Ontario Museum, Archaeology of the Americas Department, for supporting their research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This sample excludes all birdstones that are from known burial contexts and those whose shaping traces indicate possible forgery.

² This total includes all different eye-base-feet groupings. It however does not consider the presence of illusory eyes (which would bring the total of groupings up to 46) and excludes birdstone preforms and birdstones with missing or incomplete eyes or bases.

Additional information

Funding

Tiziana Gallo’s research is supported by a Rebanks Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ontario Archaeology.