Ontological Concerns
Example 5, Naming, Marking, and Numbering Bannerstones

As early as 1848, in their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Squier and Davis published an illustration of five bannerstones which at that time were often called “hatchets.” They go on to comment, “It is clear, nevertheless, both from their form and material, that they were not designed for use. They may be regarded as having been intended simply for ornament or display.” Subsequent written accounts identified them as “winged,” “problematical,” or “ceremonial” forms.

Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, 1848, Fig. 114 pg. 218.

It was not until 1877, in his Stone Age in New Jersey, that C.C. Abbott first used the term bannerstone. [5] To Abbott, bannerstones were unique amongst ancient Native American lithics because of the vast array of stones used for their construction and because of their elaborately carved shapes. They were also unique because each was carefully perforated with a hole down the center, indicating that they were meant to be placed on a staff and presumably, according to Abbott, held aloft as a banner, thus the name bannerstone. Over a hundred years after bannerstones were first identified, collected, and written about as a distinct category of Indigenous carving, there are many unanswered questions about why they were made and especially why they were only made in Eastern North America between 6,000 BCE and 1,000 BCE.

[5] C. C. Abbot, Stone Age in New Jersey (Washington, DC, 1877), 332.