The Building
View from the East
The Stone Age Institute is located in Bloomington, Indiana, approximately 5 miles north of the Indiana University campus, and situated in a 30-acre tract of scenic parkland nestled in the rolling, wooded hills of southern Indiana. To our knowledge, this is the first research facility in the world dedicated to Stone Age Research.
View from the West
The building comprises four major elements: a circular tower as the entrance (with a museum gallery on the first floor and a reading room on the second floor), a two-story vaulted library/great room, an administrative wing, and a research wing with offices and laboratories. Outside architectural features include a circular stone wall in front of the entrance, a stone retaining wall behind the building, and a nearby circular stone ‘ruin’ that serves as an outdoor area for flintknapping and other experimental archaeological work.
Aerial photo from the Northwest
Conceived and designed specifically for Stone Age and human origins research, the 11,400 square foot Institute was completed in December of 2003. The architects were Mary Krupinski and Dawn Gray of the Bloomington firm, Kirkwood Design Studio. The building design was the result of a close collaboration between the architects, Stone Age Institute Co-Directors Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, and Stone Age Institute Board member, Henry Corning. The contractor was the Indianapolis firm, Meyer Najem, Inc.
Dry-stone exterior retaining wall
As Palaeolithic archaeologists, we wanted to make a strong architectural statement in stone in this facility. Over one million pounds of stone were used in the construction of the building, consisting of sandstone from Indiana and Kentucky, Indiana limestone from the Bloomington area, quartzite from the mountains of eastern Kentucky, and selected nodules of knapped English flint as accents over entrances and fireplaces. The master stone masons carefully shaped the massive stones, some weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds, and used the ancient dry-stone technique as a common theme in the tower, wainscoting, fireplaces, freestanding stone wall at the entrance, exterior retaining wall, and outdoor flintknapping circle.
Library and Great Room
,%20small.jpg)
The library/great room is the centerpiece of the building, containing the personal library of J. Desmond Clark, who donated it to the Institute before his death in 2002. The library contains over 4,000 books on prehistory and human evolution and tens of thousand of journals and articles. The personal library of Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick adds another 2,500 volumes to the resources of the Institute. The library and great room is a two-story structure with a vaulted ceiling and fireplace, and is lined with bookcases and lateral file drawers for reprints and articles. In illuminated display niches above the bookcases are casts of fossil hominid skulls from four million years ago to recent times, as well as casts of extinct Pleistocene animals. A twenty-foot conference table allows for large discussion groups and small conferences.
Tower and Displays
The tower serves as the main entrance to the Institute and is modeled after dry stone towers from prehistory, such as the Neolithic tower at Jericho, the Great Zimbabwe, and, especially, the Celtic brochs from Scotland. The tower is 35 feet tall and 30 feet across. The sandstone interior of the tower on the first floor incorporates a museum gallery with five limestone niches holding displays representing major stages of the Stone Age. A grid pattern in the floor of the tower emulates the layout of an archaeological excavation, with the central meter square recessed and showing a glimpse of a simulated Stone Age site, with an array of flint artifacts and fossil mammal bones. The second floor of the tower is the periodical reading room of the library, reached from the mezzanine balcony. Entranceways to the tower are flanked by massive sandstone slabs, each weighing several thousand pounds and exhibiting ripple marks from an ancient tidal flat about 330 million years ago.
Three display niches
The simulated Stone Age site
The upstairs reading room
Administrative Wing
Staff gather in the kitchen for coffee
The administrative wing of the Institute includes a reception area, an administrative workroom, the layout room of the Stone Age Institute Press, and the offices and meeting areas of the co-directors. A fully-equipped kitchen just off the library allows Institute staff to prepare meals and is used for catered events as well.
Research Wing
An additional eight research offices and three laboratories are housed in the research wing. The basement laboratory contains a layout room for analysis as well as storage of comparative research collections. All offices face to the west, offering a scenic view of the Institute grounds and pond, and a four-mile vista of forested hills.
Dietrich Stout in his office
Nicholas Toth using a microscope
in the upstairs lab
Sileshi Semaw in his office
Grounds
The grounds of the Stone Age Institute comprise 30 acres of parkland bordered by protected forested land trust. These grounds include a large pond, an outdoor research area for experimental archaeology (built as an archaeological "ruin" of our stone tower), hayfields that provide feed for neighboring farmers' livestock, and four scenic karst sinkholes. The property rests on Mississippian limestone deposited ca. 330 million years ago when much of eastern North America comprised an inland sea; fossils of crinoids, brachiopods, and corals, as well as calcite and quartz geodes, are plentiful in these deposits.
Floorplan
The main entrance to the Stone Age Institute is the circular stone tower. Radiating from the tower are the other three major elements of the building: the adminstrative wing to the north, the library and great room to the west, and the research wing to the south.
The research wing also has a second floor of offices and a laboratory, as well as a basement laboratory and storage area. On the second floor of the tower is a periodical reading room that conects with the mezzanine level of the library.
The Architects
Architects Mary Krupinski (center) and Dawn Grey (left) of Kirkwood Design Studio worked on the design of the building in consultation with Stone Age Institute officers Henry Corning, Kathy Schick, and Nicholas Toth to achieve an end product that was both functional from a research perspective and aesthetically pleasing. A year was spent on the design phase of the project, and a year was spent on the construction phase. Here Mary and Dawn confer with master stone mason Mark Martin regarding the stone-work so prominently featured in the building project.
The Stone Masons
Two teams of stone masons participated in the construction project. These were:
- Forgotten Roads Masonry of McKee, Kentucky, specialists in dry stone masonry. Owner Mark Martin and his crew worked on the interior of the tower, the fireplace and chimney in the library/great room, the freestanding dry stone wall in front of the Institute, and the dry stone retaining wall at the back. They also built the outdoor "archaeological ruin" for experimental archaeology
- Whaley Construction Co. of Bloomington, Indiana, some of the premier stone masons of southern Indiana, who do much of the stone work on the Indiana University campus. They were responsible for stone laying on the outside of the tower, the wainscoting, and the exterior of the large fireplace.
