*** CANCELLED *** ANNA BLUME: Stone Age Aesthetics: On the Bannerstones of Archaic Eastern North America
UIC Art History Colloquium
April 10, 2020
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
In this paper I will present current understanding regarding when, where, and how bannerstones were made by Archaic North American hunter gatherers between 6,000 – 1,000 BCE. From what we know to what we can hypothesize, I will ask why these anomalous lithics were only made during this period, what they might have been used for and how and in what way we can compare and distinguish them from other carved lithic tools, seeing in them aesthetic works of refined, individual expression. The title Stone Age Aesthetics is taken and modified from Marshal Sahlins’ 1972 Stone Age Economics in which he argued against the grain of previous assumptions regarding social consciousness and sophistication of hunter gatherers in the South Pacific. My goal is to raise similar questions about aesthetic sensibility of choosing and shaping stone into bannerstones.
Anna Blume is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and the coordinator of the Ethics and Sustainability Minor at the State University of New York, FIT where she has taught courses on prehistoric art and the ancient arts of the Americas for the past eighteen years. She received her Ph.D. from Yale and has been a recipient of a Fulbright, Ford Foundation, American Philosophical Society, and multiple SUNY grants to carry out field research in the making and meaning of art from Ancient Mesoamerica to the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys. She is author of “Ancient Architecture in the Mississippi Valley: Monumentality Seen and Unseen,” RES Anthropology and Aesthetics (69/70), and “Maya Concepts of Zero,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (155).
Selected Bibliography relevant Lecture Topic:
Archaic Bannerstone Project Website (especially see Resource section)
https://bannerstone.fitnyc.edu/
Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962).
Date posted
Feb 1, 2020
Date updated
Mar 10, 2020