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.

02 October 2011

Junior archaeologist and paleontologist Brennah Thomas, age 8, discovers a worked, scallop-shaped, plaquette as "canvas and frame" of fossils

Licking County, Ohio, find by Brennah Thomas, age 8

(click photo to expand)

A worked, scallop-shaped, stone provides both "canvas and frame" for the artist to highlight round and scallop-shaped limestone fossils. The plaquette seems to have had a number of discrete breaks around its edges, 11 by informal count, made to form the ultimate shell-like shape of the object. The entire profile appears worked.

By virtue of her young age, Brennah T. has a good eye for anomalous and sometimes humanly worked stones, not being as weighed down by the culturally derived baggage which inevitably biases the older investigator. This was a surface find from a prehistoric cultural site producing tools and lithic debris which she brought to my attention because "It's like a shell with fossils." She picked it up as a possible artifact based on her familiarity with the appearance of them, its unique shape, and then noticed the little fossil inclusions

A scallop shell line drawing to compare to the outline shape of Brennah's find. John Feliks, Pd.D., of the University of Michigan, has written on the subject of fossils inspiring early visual arts as evidenced by the archaeological record and his geometric analyses. Dr. Feliks is a founder of the Pleistocene Coalition, a link found to that organization's web site is located in the right side screen panel. Here is a link to his web site on the fossil art subject:

Impact of Fossils on the Development of Visual Representation by John Feliks, Ph.D.

Reverse side of the artifact

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Could this iconic sculpture be somewhat similar to the famous West Tofts, U.K., handaxe, where it appears the tool maker centered the design of the tool to feature a natural scallop shell fossil in the dead center as if to add an aesthetic, decorative, or even symbolic touch to the tool? The shell shape does not appear to have a functional purpose but it is battered and marked as if it could have served various minor purposes on the reverse side. Interesting circular incision marks, like those created from reed drills, could be located on this side 2. It looks like prehistoric drilling could have been done to facilitate removal of the circular fossils from the stone, or that these fossils leave holes that look like reed-drilled ones when they fall out naturally.

West Tofts, U.K., example of Acheulean handaxe centered on fossil in raw material

Related to fossils, I made a blog posting in March regarding fossil-featuring to make a black fossil or stone inclusion the center of a "pressure flaked flower" on the top of a crude grinding flint tool. It may be found at this link:

http://portablerockart.blogspot.com/2011/03/fossil-featuring-by-artist-at-center-of.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

02 October 2011

Junior archaeologist and paleontologist Brennah Thomas, age 8, discovers a worked, scallop-shaped, plaquette as "canvas and frame" of fossils

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