Bannerstone

A bannerstone is a ground and polished stone, usually palm-sized, with one large hole bored lengthwise through a thickened center (the midrib or spine) and a balanced wing or lobe on each side. Knoblock (1939) sorted them into 24 named forms, among them butterfly (single- and double-notched), hourglass, reel, bottle, geniculate, ovate, pick, crescent, double crescent, saddle-face and fluted ball.

Makers pecked a block of stone to shape with a hammerstone, ground it on gritty stone, and bored the central hole, often with a hollow tube such as cane fed with sand and water. Partly bored pieces keep a raised core inside a ring-shaped groove (Hodge 1907; Beauchamp 1897). Favored stones are colorful and fine grained: banded slate, porphyry, granite, quartz, quartzite, greenstone and other igneous and metamorphic rocks.

Most archaeologists interpret bannerstones as weights or counterbalances on the shaft of an atlatl (spear-thrower), a reading drawn from Archaic shell-midden burials in Kentucky that held stone weights together with atlatl hooks (Jefferies 2008). Experiments have not shown that a weight adds much force, and very large or fragile examples are read as ceremonial; many were broken or split along the spine before being cached or placed in graves (Blume 2025). The key trait is a single large, carefully bored hole running through a thickened midrib between two symmetrical wings.

Most fit in the palm of a hand; weight about 46–500 g (Blume 2025). Metropolitan Museum examples: double-notched butterfly 59 × 89 × 28 mm (banded slate); others 76 × 121 mm and 152 × 127 mm. A New York butterfly is 111 mm wide and 70 mm high with a bore about 16 mm across (Beauchamp 1897, converted from inches).

Eastern North America, from the Great Lakes and southern Ontario to the Florida Panhandle and from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast; Knoblock placed the heartland around the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers (Blume 2025). The Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina was a production center, and finished and unfinished pieces were carried south into Florida (Archaeology 2017; Blume 2025).

Look for one large hole bored through the length of the midrib. A hole drilled across a thin flat plate points to a gorget or pendant; boatstones are hollowed underneath with two small end holes; birdstones and bar amulets have angled holes drilled into the base at each end (Beauchamp 1897). Reel bannerstones resemble reel-shaped gorgets, but the gorgets are thin plates with two small holes through the face (Mills 1916). Abbott coined the name in the 1870s, guessing they were carried on staffs like banners; Hodge (1907) notes "butterfly stones" for the winged variety. Knoblock's (1939) form names remain the standard terms and are used by the FIT Bannerstone Project. Many pieces in collections lack context; dated examples come from Archaic shell middens, burials and caches such as Indian Knoll, Kentucky, and from Poverty Point, Louisiana (Jefferies 2008; Blume 2025).