Reading images stone b.c.

The vibrant artistic traditions of America's Pacific Northwest Coast peoples are well documented in the ethnographic literature. Far less numerous, but equally fascinating, are the artworks which survive from a prehistoric period lasting at least 10,000 years. One little known collection of 136 stone artefacts from this area was brought together for exhibition in 1975. The striking and often explicit sexual imagery of these artefacts prompted anthropologist Wilson Duff to offer an unconventional, and therefore also controversial reading of their meaning in his book images stone b.c. In reading images stone b.c. through the lens of queer theory this paper suggests that the radical potential of Wilson Duff's ideas, and his vision of these artefacts in particular, was far greater than he was able to realize before his untimely death.