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.

16 September 2011

Museum of the Origins of Man identifies Paleolithic human head sculptures similar to Oregon examples

Paleolithic human head sculpture from Savona, Italy, identified by Museum of the Origins of Man, Pietro Gaietto

"Fig. 4.14) Lithic sculpture. It represents a head of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis with neck, and look upwards .

Size: Height cm. 15. It is worked in both the sides, almost full-relief. It has a pointed nape. It is a classic Neanderthalian.

Place of origin: Valle del Vero, Toirano, Savona, Italy.

Material culture: Mousterian.

Collection Museum of the Origins of Man."

Sight line of eyes on human face depicted in this illustration by Pietro Gaietto

Irrigon, Oregon, sculpture standing in anthropomorphic position. This sculpture has been the subject of an earlier posting with focus on its fish imagery when sitting on another of its flat, narrow, edges.

Side 2 of Irrigon, Oregon, sculpture

Portland, Oregon, anthropomorphic piece identified by Nona A. It was found in the context of suspected crude stone tools and other art pieces.

Side 2 from Portland, Oregon, collection of Nona A.

Portland, Oregon, from Nona A. collection

(click photos to expand)

Portland, Oregon, from Nona A. collection

(click to expand)

Savona, Italy, Museum of the Origins of Man

"Fig. 4.29) Lithic Sculpture. It represents a head of Homo sapiens sapiens with neck.

Size: Height cm. 27.

Place of origin: S.Pietro d'Olba, Savona, Italy.

Material culture: upper Paleolithc.

Worked from two sides, it is nearly a frontal representation. This type of sculpture, with high and robust neck, is present in several anthropomorphic menhirs at Carnac, with several types of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Collection Museum of the Origins of Man."

Museum of the Origins of Man, Pietro Gaietto founder and curator, Genova, Italy

Sculptures of the human head in Paleolithic sculpture

Phylogenesis of Beauty, Pietro Gaietto

The work of Pietro Gaietto of Genova, Italy, predicted the motif and location of a carved human head with a beard on one of the seven Ohio flint sculptures found together in a "hoard." Please see the "Subtle Artifacts" link to read the article and see photos of these seven associated sculptures found in Licking County, Ohio.

One of the seven Ohio sculptures was a stunning visual match to one of Gaietto's Italian sculptures and only after reading Gaietto I detected a man's head profile in the place on the Ohio sculpture where he said it would be on this type of artifact. Any person in a room with this sculpture can see the human head profile once it is brought to their attention, just as Gaietto brought it to my attention and helped me to understand what had been a strangely amorphous but obviously worked flint cobble until then. This kind of "replication" of Gaietto's work has led me to conclude it might be very instructive on the subject of pre-sculpture and early sculpture- even in the Americas. As crude, rough and strange as they seem, the forms and general aesthetic sense invoked by the sculptures identified and documented by Gaietto have also been independently detected by others as suspected artifacts in Eurasia and the United States.

Gaietto is author of "Phylogenesis of Beauty - A Unified Theory of Evolution" E.N.Z.A., 2008, Genova.

Subtle Artifacts: Seven Ohio Paleolithic flint sculptures One of the seven Ohio sculptures is a morphological "match" to an Italian sculpture identified by Gaietto and has a human face profile where Gaietto's typology predicted.

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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

16 September 2011

Museum of the Origins of Man identifies Paleolithic human head sculptures similar to Oregon examples

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