Magical Birdstones

Timothy writes that his 83 year old aunt owns something he thinks might be a Native American club. I don’t think anybody elver used this as a weapon, Timothy. I think it’s a late Archaic/Early Woodland enigmatic, mysterious – and valuable – birdstone.

Native Americans East of the Mississippi, around the Great Lakes to the eastern Seaboard, carved these amulets. Early archeologists named them ‘birdstones’ because the form takes the shape of a bird in two distinct forms. One, a sitting bird with an expanded tail and head with projecting eyes. Two, a plain bar which fits in the hand easily and merely suggests the body of the bird, called a bar form amulet. Both are no longer than 6.5 inches long at the most, and both have circular bore holes. I think Timothy’s aunt’s birdstone is a bar amulet birdstone. Birdstones, named after birds because taken as a category, they resemble birds more than anything else. Yet no two are alike as they change in form from birdlike to bar like. In short, all birdstones are abstract art, some more abstracted than others.

Nobody knows what Native Americans used birdstones for. I’m surprised that from the first discovery of one such form in 1840 no archeologist ever deemed it ‘art’, a ritual form of material culture. I remember, in thinking about this lack of insight, the series of birds sculpted by Constanin Brancusi.  His first, “Magic Bird” in 1912, he took from a Romanian myth. Brancusci said, of making his bird, “Towards the sky – immensity is my bird. As a child I always dreamed of the ability to fly up to the heavens…for 45 years I bear this dream. I do not wish to represent a bird but to give expression to her own quality and spirit: the flight, the impetus. The greatest joy is the contact of our essence with the eternal essence.” I think  these 3,000 year old birdstones capture that essence.

Ceremonial or utilitarian – or both?

A sword, a chalice, a book, can be both ceremonial and utilitarian in Western culture. Archeologists put forward many ideas these 150 years, yet they’ve only discovered 1,000 or so birdstones, none with any other object. Other objects might give a clue to the birdstone’s purpose. Suggestions from archeologists include:

• attachment to canes
• mounted on staffs
• used as a spear (atlatl) weight
• used as an atlatl grip
• attached to smoking pipes
• hung for luck on game bags or quivers or duck decoys
• aids for help in child birth, and finality
• attached to flutes.

They only found a handful in burial sites, so archeologist say Native Americans didn’t use them as part of burial rituals. Since archeologists claim they fit so nicely in the human hand, perhaps this means a connection. Most are made of greenish gray slate, a hard and durable material, thus indicating the importance of the objects. Because of the hardness of the stone and the simple stone carving tools used, these took great skill and time to carve, and then polish to a high finish, possibly with sand.

Birdstones are one of the most interesting artifacts left behind by early North Americans, rare and mysterious. Ages ago (1585-87) , Thomas Hariot traveled to Virginia with Sir Walter Raleigh and his watercolorists John White, who stayed to colonize. In A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, published in 1588, White drew a Native shaman/sorcerer wearing a bird effigy with extended wings on his head, dancing in a trance, and holding his arms and face skyward. Today, my dictionary of symbols tells me that the Hopi attribute to birds the magical power of communicating with the sky people, who rule creation and life and bring rain, as well as opening the Gate (communication). Thus looking for a logical reason for birdstones may be as useless as speculating what birds were for.

Timothy, the best book on these curious stones is 1959 Birdstones of the North American Indian, privately published, Indianapolis, Indiana, by the eminent collector Earl C. Townsend, Jr. Timothy, the best of the best of these birdstones sell for upwards of $20,000.