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.

28 August 2011

Art on a stone flake: a translucent head shaped flint with two simple faces

Human head in left profile. The flake was found by Dennis Boggs, Boardman, Oregon, in the valley floor potato fields growing right alongside the Columbia River near Irrigon. The location is about 45 miles downriver from Kennewick, WA.

Side 1 again. Click to expand, this is a nice photo. Forehead, eye, nose, mouth, chin all seem to be present in micro-carving. Click photo to expand. The photo left side of the flake as shown here has been worked to take advantage of the translucence of the flint. Shown above with morning light streaming from behind. The left edge of the flint has been re-touched by the artist to refine the facial features. The features are highlighted when one holds the flake up to low angle sunlight.

Side 2 with natural morning sunlight illuminating from behind. It depicts a face in right profile view. A small incised line makes for a mouth in the bottom right of the artifact here, the dark spot is maybe a nose, right eye in center, part of left eye seen on other side of the nose on edge of artifact.

Side 2, artifact on a 1cm grid to provide scale

Right eye has been ground into the cortex surface. It is located in the center of the artifact here and the left eye is on the screen right edge of the flint looking like a crescent shaped gouge. Because of the left facial profile view presented by the artist, the left eye is seen only in part because it is partially hidden by the nose. This seems to be a rather complex visual technique for the artist to accomplish. Most all of the flint observable here is the rind from the original stone cortex- weather battered except for the two eye holes and an incision for a mouth. Side 2 is from inside the core.

Side 2 as back lighted as a lithophane

Side 1, artifact as back lit in a dark room as a "lithophane."

Side 1, inside the cortex exposed by this flake removal were some beautiful crystal formations. Artifact on centimeter(cm) grid for scale. The flint fractures here appear to be well-weathered which attests to some combination of time and abrasive environmental forces acting on the piece. All the crystal formations look like brains inside the head or maybe head hair.

This whole flint nodule, not just a flake made off one, is of the same material as the flake art piece and shows a precedent for making facial icons out of this beautiful orange/red translucent lithic material in the locale of the Columbia River, Irrigon, Oregon. A similar grinding technique was used to create all four eyes on the two figure stones.

http://portablerockart.blogspot.com/search?q=lithophane

Another earlier posting of a human head left profile utilizing translucent material, from L Jimmy Groen of The Netherlands.Artifact from Neanderthal strata ca. 45,000 to 55,000 years BP from L Jimmy Groen, stone tools expert from The Netherlands. Ken Johnston detected what could be a human facial profile in the translucent material, Neanderthal in nature, and then it was confirmed the find context and site dating made it entirely possible.

http://portablerockart.blogspot.com/2011/02/neanderthal-cameo-from-netherlands.html

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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

28 August 2011

Art on a stone flake: a translucent head shaped flint with two simple faces

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