Archaeology of Portable Rock Art

Subjectivity in Stone Age art works such as figure stones, engravings, sculptures, effigies and curated manuports. See how images and icons have been realized in portable rock media since the dawn of humanity. Here, archaeologists and art historians are becoming aware of these forsaken artifacts. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing." -in W. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599.

17 April 2011

Here comes Peter Cottontail....

Peter Cottontail
click photo to expand size

Polymorphic rabbit/feline/bear/deer/human sculpture
from Licking County, Ohio USA

lithic material is from Flint Ridge

photos taken on a CM grid for scale and perspective

This photo is an aide to refer back to the above to see a feline visage as highlighted here in blue. Relax your focus, "look through your eyelashes," or stand at a distance from the screen to best see the big cat.

Closer view of rabbit's head

This is back half of the rabbit. Back of the ear tip is seen in black material in upper left corner. Two animal head images are seen here, taken to be a lion face and bear head in right profle. Because they share common features in the stone, it may be difficult to percieve.

This is a bear head in right profile view. Here, I have whited out a portion of the lion's face which is distracting to the bear image because they share features. Orange arrow points to ear (serves also as the right eye of the second lion visage). Blue arrow points to tip of nose. Purple arrow points to tip the bear's chin.

Short faced bear (Arctodus)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctodus

The tip of the bear's face may also depict the face of a man in right profile so this could be taken as a "synthesis of man's face with a bears head." The man and bear share the same mouth. If one pays visual attention to the front of the faces like shown in this photo, the human depiction becomes more clear. It looks like the face has a mournful frown.

Pink and black are lion's eyes, yellow is the nose. The nose also looks like a caprid (deer?) icon with its head turned as if looking behind it. It appears there is a chunk or "bite" out of the hind quarter of the deer. The deer is squarely in the eyes of the lion, being its nose. Blue is the snarling mouth of the lion.

The maroon band of flint which is the face-on lion's snarling mouth, also seems to serve as red hairdo, or a turban style wrap, atop a grinning woman's face. There appears to be an ear decoration on the woman, like an earring. Maybe the woman is being consumed by the lion, the lion's red lips grasping her head to begin a meal?

Arrow points to earring looking stone feature. I hypothesize the frowning man's face (fourth photo above) is mourning the loss of his partner, shown here at the lion's mouth, to predation. Based on the paleo-anthropological record of skeletal remains, it is estimated 6% to 10% of early humans died at the jaws, paws and claws of carnivores. So, humans were more in the food chain than solely at the top of the food chain in pre-modern times.

In final, the interpretations of images here are of two lion faces, a bear head, a man's face, a woman's face, one deer and one two-sided rabbit. A third lion image, with paw extended toward the viewer and a tooth showing, has not been marked up in the photos. Can you find it?

North American lion (Panthera leo atrox) reconstruction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Lion

Photo looking down on artifact as it stands on its base. Without recognition, art pieces like this are being overlooked, forsaken by archaeologists, passed off as debitage or other debris, suitable for the pile of "burden stones."

A similar looking sculpture with animals on two sides. This side looks like the artifact featured in this post. Also from Licking County, Ohio.

This side looks like a rabbit with a crystal inclusion perhaps representing the "magic womb" of the reproductive proclivity of this animal. This is one of seven sculptures found in immediate proximity (a hoard) in Licking County Ohio and featured at the web site: http://subtleartifacts.com

Side two of the featured figure stone (on CM grid)

Side two again

Flint Ridge is the source for the raw material in this post.

Click photo to expand size

-kbj

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Warren K. Moorehead on the imperitive to collect "rough and rude" art

“… The museums are full of axes, celts, pipes, banner stones, discoidals, hematites, tubes, slate ornaments and ceremonials, pestles, hammers, etc. What the museums need (as of great value to Archaeological Science) are collections from a single locality including everything found in that locality. They want the finds of the village site, the studies in unfinished specimens, the poor and the good, the imperfect as well as the perfect. In this regard, the collectors make a great error. Most of them do not save everything but cling to the ‘pretty relics’ and discard the rough and the rude. Personally, I would give more for a collection, provided it contained all the types, all the finds of a certain valley than for just the fine, perfect objects of that valley. From a collection of the latter, I would be misled, for if I accepted it as indicative of the people of that valley, I would say they made the most beautiful works of aboriginal art, nothing rude or unfinished being turned out by their artisans. In such a statement, I would be unpardonably wrong.”

Warren K. Moorehead, 1884

Sculptor Henry Moore

"The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by people with a direct and immediate response to life. Sculpture and painting for them was not an activity of calculation or academism, but a channel for expressing powerful beliefs, hopes and fears.

Primitive art is a mine of information for the historian and anthropologist, but to understand and appreciate it, it is more important to look at it than to learn the history of primitive peoples, their religions and social customs…But all that is really needed is response to the carvings themselves, which have a constant life of their own, independent of whenever and however they were made, and remain as full of sculptural meaning today to those open and sensitive enough to receive it as on the day they were finished." --Henry Moore, 1941

Ursel Benekendorff is recognized in the vanguard of Stone Age art inquiry and study

(This image is Copyright (c), Ursel Benekendorff, All Rights Reserved. May not be copied or distributed in any way. Used here with permission of Ursel Benekendorff for purpose of linking to her web site Schafftwissen) Stone age art pioneer Ursel Benekendorff has 2000 photographs and demonstrates standardization in the production of the world's oldest art. “My work was a pioneer work, without help of curators or technical experts. Self developed methods helped me, to stay on top of thousands of pieces of extraordinary shapes, excavated by digging machines. I was fast but not that fast and not all artifacts could have been rescued, still Menhir sizes, microlithic material, handsize stones and Un- PORTABLE sized stones were documented. That was more than most collectors assembled or documented, as I learned later on. I had invited large numbers of people to my site, so I know how they go about it all, they operate on a personal preferences, thus a wide open field, possessing is the goal, not so much the unsolved research questions. You see it was not my goal to find the best but the goal was, to clear misleading pictures and find those, who got repeated. This needed a large variety of stone types to detect the repetition by former artists. (Not looking pictures into the stones). But I wanted and still want to know, how the logo face stone on my website created his surrounding.” -Ursel Benekendorff

A book on Siberian portable rock art could provide clues to North American possibilities

Early art of the northern Far East : the Stone Age, by M. A. Kiriyak. This book is about the portable rock art of the Russian north east area. It was written in Russian but has been translated to English by the United States National Park Service's Shared Beringia Heritage Program. The hundreds of iconographic artifacts described and pictured here should inform North American archaeologists regarding the possibilities for art modalities having arrived via Beringia during peopling of the Americas migrations. The book is available for preview at the link here.

Archaeology of Portable Rock Art

Denisovan Ancestry in East Eurasian and Native American Populations

17 April 2011

Here comes Peter Cottontail....

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