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.

05 September 2011

Joel Castanza documents 37 Point Barrow zoomorphic sculptures from Alaskan archaeological history and identified as possible amulets

Flaked Grey Chert Grizzly Bear Effigy

Length: Snout to Tail 2.82" = 7.14cm

Height: Front Shoulder to Bottom of Front Foot: 1.28" = 3.3cm

Height: Rear Hump to bottom of Rear Foot: 1.44"= 3.61cm

Thickness: .30"

Lithic Comp.: Grey Chert

Distinct hump on the back suggests a grizzly bear

Cultural Association: Birnirk

Possible Age: Birnirk 1,700 B.P.- 600 B.P.

Provenance: Collected by Thomas Kennedy at Pt. Barrow 1883, Sold to Dr. HH Stewart of Eureka Ca., Sold to Gene Favell for the Favell Museum in the 1970's.

This item was de-accessioned in 2004. Purchased by Lummi Trading company, then sold to me (Joel Castanza) in early 2008.

(click photo to expand)

Above text and photographs courtesy of alaskanartifacts.com, Mr. Joel Castanza. This is greatly appreciated by portablerockart.com.

A Russian book, "Early Art of the Northern far East" on Siberian portable rock art has been published in English by the US Park Service and Russian Shared Beringia Heritage project. It may help provide an old world precedent for iconographic North American artifact material such as Joel Castanza has thankfully brought to public attention. A link to a book sample is found here:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/early-art-of-the-northern-far-east-the-stone-age/oclc/313729350/viewport

1 comment:

Stephen LoringDecember 5, 2016 at 12:04 AM
I thought you might like to know that we have several of these "amulets" that are nearly identical to this one in the collections from Pt. Barrow that were made during the International Polar Year in 1881-1882 by John Murdoch for the Smithsonian and now housed in the NMNH's collection storage facility at Suitland, Maryland. In addition to bears there are chipped stone dogs and human figures as well as several bowhead whales. The bears, humans and dogs are all made with the same local grey chert while the whale amulets are made of glass and a red jasper. The chipped stone amulets are described in Murdoch's Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition (1892) --but readily available in a reprinted edition. I am pretty sure that these are contemporary artifacts in use, or only recently abandoned, in the late 19th century.

Stephen Loring, Arctic Studies Center, SI
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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

05 September 2011

Joel Castanza documents 37 Point Barrow zoomorphic sculptures from Alaskan archaeological history and identified as possible amulets

1 comment: