Bar Amulet

A bar amulet is a long, narrow bar of polished stone, roughly 100–160 mm long and about 20–25 mm high and wide, with a flat or slightly hollowed underside. Some are plain straight rods; others rise slightly at the middle and ends, have swollen ends, or carry a low ridge along the back. The most elaborate grade into the simple bar-shaped birdstone (Moorehead 1910; Beauchamp 1897; Fowke 1902).

Bars were pecked and ground from banded or dark green slate and polished. At each end a hole was bored up into the base and met by a second hole drilled in from the end, so the two join at an angle inside the stone; this gave a pair of tie-holes for binding the bar flat against something. Birdstones carry the same paired holes (Beauchamp 1897; Hodge 1907).

Their use is unknown. Moorehead (1910) listed earlier guesses, that they were worn on the forearm, the head or the chest, without choosing between them, and Fowke (1902) placed them at the plain end of a series that runs through saddle-shaped stones to birdstones. In Ontario they are found with pop-eyed birdstones and gorgets in Middlesex burials (Ontario Archaeological Society). The key trait is a slender polished slate bar with angled tie-holes drilled into the underside at both ends.

Length 102–159 mm; height and width about 19–25 mm (New York and Toronto specimens, Beauchamp 1897, converted from inches). Ontario bar-type birdstones are 100–170 mm long and 35–50 mm high (Donaldson and Wortner 1995).

Great Lakes region, Ohio, New York and southern Ontario; common in the lake region and Canada and very rarely found south of the Ohio River (Fowke 1902). Of 38 bar amulets in the Douglass collection, 22 came from Ohio (Beauchamp 1897).

Turn the piece over: two holes at each end, one from the base and one from the end, meeting inside. Gorgets have holes through the flat face, bannerstones one central lengthwise hole, and boatstones a hollowed underside. A bar with a raised head or a fanned tail is better called a birdstone; Ontario archaeologists call plain bars "bar-type birdstones", so the two names overlap (Donaldson and Wortner 1995). Bar amulets are rarer than birdstones: the Toronto museum held about 20 against about 50 bird amulets in Beauchamp's day (Beauchamp 1897). Moorehead (1910) also noted ridged gorgets that grade toward bars, but those are drilled through the face beside the center, not at the ends.