Ceremonial Mace

A ceremonial mace is a large chipped-stone object with a narrow grip that widens into a broad, flattened, curved head, usually 330–510 mm long and about 125 mm wide, often with matched projections on opposite edges. Despite their size, they are thin, about 13 mm at the grip, and thickest near the blunt head, so they are not cutting tools (Thruston 1897).

Most were chipped from large pieces of chert by percussion and fine pressure flaking into thin, symmetrical outlines; Thruston described the Evans mace from southern Kentucky as dark gray chert. Ground and polished stone objects of related "ax-form mace" shape, of greenstone or shale, are known from Spiro (Lamb 2013), so the line between maces and monolithic axes is not sharp.

Thruston (1897) matched their outline to a mace held by a warrior engraved on a shell gorget from Sumner County, Tennessee, which showed that the narrow end was the grip. Archaeologists treat them as emblems of rank or ritual weapons rather than tools. The best-known group comes from the Duck River cache, found in 1894 in Humphreys County, Tennessee, with nearly four dozen ceremonial knives, daggers and swords and two stone statues (Smith, Tennessee Encyclopedia). The key trait is an oversized, thin chipped-flint outline with a narrow grip and a broad blunt head.

Length 337–508 mm; width about 127 mm; grip about 13 mm thick (Tennessee and Kentucky specimens, Thruston 1897, converted from inches).

Middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky, especially the Cumberland and Duck river valleys (Thruston 1897); related forms at Spiro, Oklahoma (Lamb 2013).

Oversized, thin, chipped and blunt-headed: no working edge. The Library's Duck River Ceremonial Blade covers the swords, daggers and other eccentric blades from the same caches, and monolithic axes are ground stone with a separate celt-shaped blade. Thruston (1897) called them scepters or royal maces; Bell (1980) uses the name flint maces and counts them, with monolithic axes and spuds, among artifacts very rare in Oklahoma. Nearly all come from caches or burials at mound centers.