Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of Recognizing and Interpreting Stone Artifacts in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Flint arrowheads, spearheads, and axe heads made by prehistoric Europeans were generally considered before the eighteenth century to be a naturally produced stone that formed in storm clouds and fell with lightning. These stones were called ceraunia, or thunderstones, and it was not until the sixteenth century that their status as a natural phenomenon was challenged. During the seventeenth century natural historians and antiquaries began to suggest that these ceraunia were not thunderstones but ancient human artifacts. I argue that natural history museums, European contact with the stone-tool using peoples in the New World, and the close relationship between natural history and antiquarianism were critical to this reinterpretation of ceraunia. Once these objects were recognized to be ancient artifacts they could be used to investigate the earliest periods of human history from sources other than texts.

New grounds for ontic trust: Information objects and LIS

“…However, some of the most interesting rock specimens are housed elsewhere, usually in the ethnological collections of these museums. So-called "thunderstones" were actually foundational to the ethnological discipline, as it was the discovery that a variety of stone artifacts in Asia, Europe and the Americas, often thought to be the remnants of legendary or biblical beings, were actually the products of prehistoric activity that could be identified as similar to those of less technologically-advanced contemporary cultures that made them scientifically interesting [78,79]. Once "thunderstones" were identified as very early hand axes and "elf arrows" as primitive stone projectile points, ethnologists as well as paleontologists became assiduous collectors and analysts of these rocks.…”

Reading Human Activity in the Landscape

“…Prehistoric stone tools are particularly likely to be seen as power-laden. In Europe up to the 17 th century, they were not recognised as being prehistoric tools, but were thought to be formed in storm clouds, falling to earth with lightning (Goodrum 2008). Beliefs in the origin of these stones in the sky, as 'teeth' or 'thunder teeth', shed by thunder spirits, have been common for many centuries in Southeast Asia (e.g.…”

The time revolution of 1859 and the stratification of the primeval mind

“…Centuries of speculation about stone tools as thunderbolts, ceraunia, were set aside. 50 However, for all their skill in building a convincing case, Prestwich and Evans were following in the well-trodden footsteps of geologists who had been exploring deep time for more than two centuries. Their evidence of fossils and strata had led them to oppose two longstanding, but different, understandings of human history based on texts.…”