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.

04 September 2011

Hexagon Rock

Ansted, West Virginia, find by Ken Johnston

(click photo to expand)

This six-sided platter was found among suspected crude stone tools and two possible bird head sculptures in a 30 meter surface sample of the Shady Creek bed at Ansted, West Virginia. The bird heads have been the subject of two recent postings on this blog. I searched the internet for images of hexagon shaped rocks and could not find any other than the kind of hexagon basalt formations from well-known Giants Causeway in Ireland and other sites. I then began to ponder the statistical probabilities of a natural rock having six sides of relative proportional equity. Not being a statistician, I thought I'd post it here for others to consider and comment on.

A similar looking, hexagon-shaped, stone from the Gault, Texas, site has a grooved double pattern which clearly identifies it as an artifact. The West Virginia hexagon rock has no such visible etchings but was found in a cut from a geologically recent creek bed and may be water worn. The Gault artifact appears to have had a break on the right side as pictured here and, if so, plausibly could have had a more equitable hexagon shape prior to the break. The lower right corner hints at an angle of the former edge of a more proportionally shaped hexagon rock.

The Gault site engraved plaque could have been a more proportionally uniform hexagon shape at one time and then broken as the red line drawn on the West Virginia hexagon rock illustrates. A foot-long ruler is pictured across the rock.

For those people familiar with geometry and aesthetics, perhaps there is something to this piece. Having found no images of hexagonal rocks on the web and finding this in a possible tool and art context, make it a candidate for possible artifactuality, perhaps a functional platter like object, but maybe intentionally made with six sides for the novelty or some culturally mediated or aesthetic purpose. I note the outline as seen in the diagram below somewhat resembles the profile, in an angular, stylized way, of a right side of a mammoth or mastodon which is sometimes represented by its simplest features in paleoart.

Mammuthus columbi, Columbian mammoth palentologist's photo reconstruction with white markups made by me to highlight major visual lines of the extinct animal and how they form a hexagon in rough proportion to the Ansted, West Virginia rock and possibly the Gault, Texas, engraved art piece.

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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

04 September 2011

Hexagon Rock

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