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.

02 May 2011

More icons, further interpretation made, of Peter Cottontail Has Left the Building

Peter Cottontail Has Left the Building (further interpreted)

click photo to expand size

artifact is sitting on a CM grid for scale

After the first posting of this artifact a few days ago, a bird icon was detected at the crest of the rabbit's back. Thanks to visitor Lyn Niday of Marion, Ohio, for reporting the bird she saw. The bird has a beak and an eye and shares its crested head with the rabbit's pointed back. It could be taken as a "cardinal" because of the crested head and red color. The "bird overseer" motif is also seen in the posting "Giant Cosmic Egg." It is not marked up in the posting but may be seen on top of the man's head/woman's head. It is strikingly similar to the one here, being separated by 2000 miles and an unknown period of time. One must look carefully to see the bird.

A proboscidean representation is seen on the rabbit's hind quarter, the rabbit leg is also the trunk of the mammoth or mastodon. An elephant eye is also worked into the flint and is marked up on the photo above.

On the right side of the artifact is yet another rabbit, looking straight on at the viewer. The sparkling silver, lightning bolt-like, inclusion in the stone appears to have been integrated a "blade of grass" the rabbit is munching on. The orange triangle is what would be the nose area of this rabbit face eating grass.

The red rabbit head profile inclusion of the grey background stone material is also highlighted in the top photo. The entire piece seems centered around this iconic inclusion. It is likely what inspired the artist to work the flint to further represent a rabbit. This rabbit head in profile also serves as the ear of the elephant. Click this photo to expand size. Photos taken on a CM grid.

For those who could not see the smiling rabbit's face in the original post, I have made the markup above to compare to the original unmarked photo as seen at left. Click photo to expand.

Dennis Boggs of Oregon detected this face on the artifact as he highlighted in the photo here. Thanks for reporting this Dennis and for rotating the photo and marking it up so a nice comparison may be made.

Rabbits, birds and elephants are thought to be major maternal and fertility icons in Paleolithic art.

-kbj

2 comments:

AnonymousJune 3, 2011 at 2:31 AM
You people are missing the whole picture. It may be shaped like a rabbit, but there is a much bigger story here. You may want to look a bit closer. See any faces or items?

C.A.H.
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Ken JohnstonJune 3, 2011 at 10:48 AM
Thanks for the comments C.A.H. Please provide more specific descriptive information about what you see in this artifact. Please explain the "bigger story" you perceive, I am very interested in hearing more from you. Sometimes it takes many eyes to sort out he imagery and possible symbolic meaning of complex pieces like this (polymorphic) one. For example, after publication, site visitor Dennis Boggs sent an email with pics highlighting a face he detected in the lower left corner of the rabbit. If you wish to contact me via email, I guarantee your continued anonymity and will not disclose your name, identity or email address to any party. Also, please describe the "items" you see as this is very interesting. Thank you again for taking time to submit your comment and feel free to send more detailed information if you would like.
-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.

Denisovan Ancestry in East Eurasian and Native American Populations

02 May 2011

More icons, further interpretation made, of Peter Cottontail Has Left the Building

2 comments: