Mouth worked in fine detail, with use of serendipitous natural features, transforms pebble into polymorphic figure stone

Mouth worked in fine detail, use of serendipitous natural features, transforms pebble into anthropomorphic figure stone.

From Irrigon, Oregon, U.S.A., Dennis Boggs collection.

Arrow points to top of mouth area where focused carving marks are seen to create the appearance of an upper and lower lip.

  

Up close of mouth.

Left profile view of the face. Click any photo to expand.

Left profile view of the face with highlighted facial features.  Compare to photo above without the highlights.  The head hair meets the ear in the middle of the big circle.

(Return to the unhighlighted photo above this one and note the details of the man's nostril)

In the photo of the artifact above this Asian elephant trunk tip, the feature inside the circle resembles the tip of such a trunk in the closed, as if holding water, position.  In the artifact photo directly below, the human mouth on the face resembles the end of a trunk in the open, perhaps roaring or calling, position.

Possible proboscidean imagery when viewed head on like this, like viewing an elephant head on where the eyebrows of the face are the big ears and the nose of the man is the trunk.  The mouth itself looks like the end of a (mammoth?) trunk.

Columbia River at Irrigon, Oregon, artifact.  Found by Dennis Boggs.  The head is facing up on its designed flat base.

A very similar stone representational technique to create the mouth details may be seen from this sculpture from Germany.  It is as if lips and a tongue are present.  Click to expand size of any photo. Photo courtesy of Ursel Benekendorff.  Photo is  ©Copyright 2011. Ursel Benekendorff.  All Rights reserved. 

http://www.schafftwissen.de/index.html

A polymorphic sculpture photographed in the garden of Jan van Es.

Artifact from Beegden, The Netherlands.  Like the Oregon example, it is a "long face" with proboscidean iconography in the eyebrows and nose, a human/mammoth morph.

-kbj