Ancient Artifacts & Antiquities, May
Lot 498:
3 5/8"Outstanding Modern Hourglass Bannerstone
3 5/8" Finely Made Modern Hour Glass Bannerstone. Perhaps the most common of hardstone reproductions over the past 100+ years bannerstones continue to attract and captivate collector’s in the Midwest. This is a very nice bannerstone made of ferruginous quartz from Alabama. This one has extra curves which can be seen in photos. For decades modern bannerstone makers have used Alabama quartz for its color and consistency to make all variety of bannerstones. Oddly enough there have been almost no pre-historic bannerstones found in Alabama made of its quartz making it fairly easy to identify a large percentage of the banners that are for sale online, sitting in collections, in antique malls or wherever they pop up. The colors vary greatly in the quartz used. They can be white, orange, yellow, red and on rare occasion other colors. Modern collector’s generally strive to have frames full of the red ones. Banners by this maker are often papered by bad authenticators for incompetent or dishonest sellers. Modern bannerstone makers agree there may be 1 in 10000 that are made like this that are actually ancient and made by native Americans. Although most are modern and not made by Native Americans they are very nice collectibles that can last forever.
Condition: Contemporary
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