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.

26 July 2011

Kermit: Tennessee worked stone sculpture stands on a flattened base and resembles a simple hand shadow puppet and the head of the famous muppet, Kermit the Frog

Worked stone identified as a possible art sculpture representing a head and mouth by amateur archaeologist Sherry Hill. The piece was found in the Doe River valley, Carter County, Tennessee.

The back of the mouth has been excavated and the convergence of the lower jaw and the upper palate is marked by a narrow and fine, deep, incised line running from side to side across the back of the mouth of the sculpture.

This rock struck an aesthetic similarity to Kermit the Frog's head when I first saw it and as I studied it more. This got me thinking about the possibility of it representing a sock-type puppet, almost like a living, laughing, rock head. As I studied the profile of my bare hand against the rock, I noticed both the outside of the rock, the part in contact with the hand when held, and the interior mouth outline of the mouth, both mirrored the outline created by the inside of my bare hand. Here is a comparison of my hand aligned with the rock while in a position as if I would be making a simple shadow puppet.

Here is the flattened base the sculpture stands upright on

One of Sherry Hill's tool finds from the Doe River valley, Carter County, Tennessee. This knife or hand axe appears heavily rolled by the environment which can be an indicator of great age or great localized forces (like blowing dirt or sandy water) acting upon the artifact, or a combination of time and heavy weathering.

Dennis Boggs find, Irrigon, Oregon, Columbia River valley. This artifact also resembles a laughing head character. It was identified as a humanly worked piece by Mr. Boggs.

View from above demonstrating the convex/concave nature of this artifact. Jan van Es, archaeologist in The Netherlands, has identified convex/concave attributes as being significant to the artists of the Middle Paleolithic and very early Upper Paleolithic times in Eurasia.

Tennessee's Kermit alongside Oregon's similar looking artifact

The chase is on!

The First Bobblehead (see earlier posting of same name), at left, from Oregon, Kermit in middle from Tennessee, and at right another possible rock head with similar mouth representation from Oregon.

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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

26 July 2011

Kermit: Tennessee worked stone sculpture stands on a flattened base and resembles a simple hand shadow puppet and the head of the famous muppet, Kermit the Frog

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