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.

19 July 2011

Relative ubiquity of portable rock art among crude tools in Eastern North America demonstrated by informal sampling of West Virginia creek bed

Duck head right profile.

Found in association with hard stone tools in Shade Creek at Ansted, Kenawah County, West Virginia. Finds and interpretation by Ken Johnston.

Find location is a few miles from the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers, which together form the Kanawah River, an Ohio River tributary. Despite its name, the New River is one of the oldest rivers in the world.

In an informal surface sampling of approximately 30 meters in length of the creek bed, in the Skaggs/Lucas families' hollow at Ansted, dozens of stone tools and two bird head sculptures were found in about two hours of surveying for stones which evidenced apparent human modification. Tool photos are included here to demonstrate context of the portable rock art finds. The second bird head sculpture will be featured in a separate posting on this blog.

Duck head reverse side with scale

Duck head features an 'eye" in bas-relief in the anatomically correct position.

View from above. The "bump" seen at the peak of the stone in this photo is the duck's bas-relief eye. Two round nostril divots may be seen on the top of the duck bill on the left side of the photo above and illustrated below with green circles.

Detail of the tip of the duck bill as seen from above looking down.

When the view of the artifact is turned upside down from the duck view, the sculpture transforms into another bird in whole body form, not just the head. The duck's mouth serves as a tail feathering representation when seeing the sculpture in this whole bird view.

Upside-down duck head side 2 also looks like a second whole bird integrated with the duck head.

Knife found in the 30 meter sample area that also produced two bird head sculptures, including the duck in this post

Knife side 2

Knife as likely held in use

Hand axe, convex side

Percussion pitting on reverse of hand axe

Hand axe as held

Awl/perforator type tools worked to points

Reverse sides of points

Detail of reduction with possible intent to leave a bulb or knob to assist grip (seen as the rounded form in lower right of tool).

An abrading block

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River)

-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

19 July 2011

Relative ubiquity of portable rock art among crude tools in Eastern North America demonstrated by informal sampling of West Virginia creek bed

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