Birdstone

A birdstone is a polished stone carving, usually 25–150 mm long, that suggests a perched bird: a long body with a raised head at one end and a tail at the other, resting on a flat base. Forms run from almost featureless bars through saddle shapes to realistic birds with a beak and a fanned, upturned tail. The popeyed form has the eyes carved as knobs projecting from the sides of the head (Hodge 1907; Moorehead 1910).

Most are banded slate (Wheeler 2018; Hodge 1907). Blanks were pecked out, ground and polished. At each end of the base a hole was drilled up from the underside and met by a tapering hole drilled in from the end, so the two join at an angle inside the stone.

Their use is debated. Nineteenth-century accounts said they were worn on the head; most modern writers favor mounting on an atlatl as a weight or grip (Wheeler 2018; Milwaukee Public Museum). At the Hind site in Ontario two birdstones lay in a cremation burial in a position that ruled out attachment to an atlatl at burial, and an excavated Meadowood birdstone shows little lashing wear (Donaldson and Wortner 1995; Williamson et al. 2008). The key trait is a flat-based bird- or saddle-shaped stone with angled tie-holes drilled into both ends of the base.

Length about 25–150 mm (1–6 in, Wheeler 2018). An excavated Meadowood birdstone from the Peace Bridge site, Ontario, is 149.8 mm long, 24 mm wide and 28.2 mm high (Williamson et al. 2008).

Most common in the Ohio Valley and around the southern Great Lakes: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York and southern Ontario (Wheeler 2018; Hodge 1907). Moorehead (1910) drew the range from Davenport, Iowa, and central Minnesota east to New Brunswick and the Atlantic coast; few occur south of Kentucky or west of the Mississippi, and Fowke (1896) called them exceedingly rare south of the Ohio River.

Check the base for the paired angled holes at both ends and a flat or slightly hollowed underside. Bar amulets are the plain end of the same series and carry the same holes (Fowke 1902); boatstones are hollowed underneath, and bannerstones have one central lengthwise hole. Popeyed birdstones are diagnostic of Meadowood and Middlesex in Ontario, though a nubbin-eyed example from the Rikley site may be older (Williamson et al. 2008). Few birdstones come from secure excavated contexts (Wheeler 2018); the Hind site pair were the first found in place under controlled conditions in Ontario (Donaldson and Wortner 1995). Townsend (1959) is the standard illustrated survey. Ontario Early Woodland sites show birdstones being made from local banded-slate river cobbles (Donaldson and Wortner 1995).