Ontological Concerns Example 5, AMNH DN/305
Double Notched Butterfly bannerstone; Ohio, banded slate, h. 7.5, w. 11.5 cm; detail
As with the Double Edged slate and the Bottle quartz bannerstones, handwritten markings were signs of inclusion into private collections. Once they came into a museum collection like the AMNH, they were given over to an institution that represents the broader ethos of the early 20th museum as a place of study, learning, and national identity. As bannerstones moved from private collectors to national public collections, each change of hand left a trace of itself like the echo of an invertebrate in the form of a trace fossil so appealing to the original bannerstone makers. Another example is the Double Notched Ovate AMNH DN/305. Here a luminous red “D” enclosed in a diamond is written just over the edge of a trace fossil track within the olive green of the banded slate. The letters and numbers N305 Stark Co. Ohio. are written in white similar in color to the milky white of the trace fossil. In the AMNH Native North American Archeological Collection, the letter “D” written onto lithics enclosed in a red diamond, as in DN/305 refers to the last name of Andrew Ellicott Douglass [6], one of the most important donors to the collection. After Douglass retired as the President of the Hazard Powder Company in 1876, he spent the remaining twenty-five years amassing a collection of 23,000 Native American artifacts, mostly lithics, that he donated to the AMNH in 1880. [7]
Of the 472 bannerstones in the AMNH collection, only two are displayed in the museum, on the third floor in a glass case labeled “Archaic Indian Tools.” The remaining 470 bannerstones and bannerstone fragments are arrayed on shelves locked in metal storage units in the museum basement. And though these bannerstones were made and buried in hundreds of constructed earthen mounds and caches or layered into middens across Eastern North America they reside here, marked with names of those who collected and carefully numbered them, waiting, the way stone in particular can wait, to be seen or understood.
[6] Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1819-1901) is often confused with Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1867-1962) who was an astronomer who invented dendrochronology (dating archaeological remains in regards to tree rings) and was funded by the AMNH from 1919 to 1920 on an expedition in the Southwest.
[7] Henry Fairfield Osborn, The American Museum of Natural History its Origin, its History the Growth of its Departments, (New York, 1911), 87.