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.

06 February 2012

Artist and rock collector discovers pierre figures near Prescott, Arizona

"Jean-Paul" (click photo to expand)

Discoveries made by N. Clark, Prescott, Arizona

N. Clark writes to portablerockart.com: "Two years ago, I started to find rocks with carvings of animals, showed them to family and friends and to the local archaic rock expert. Same response. All nature made. Until I showed them to this friend who saw what I saw. I do not have any archeological background. I just like rocks, appreciate beauty, creativity. I am looking at them with an artist's eye. I have been totally amazed by all the things I have seen and have been thinking: This is a BIG puzzle! (Nothing in the specialty books around here could give me a clue)."

This possible bird head form in left profile view could also be interpreted as incorporating a human facial right profile on the right side in this photo, each creature facing away from each other Janus-like. This same "human face on back of bird's head" motif may possibly be seen on this duck head found in a West Virginia creek bed by Ken Johnston. The 3rd photo at the link is best.

These Arizona finds are "in accordance" with Paleolithic pierres figures, or figure stones, identified from the "old world." Often artists and others with keen eyes will bring rock objects they have found to the attention of archaeologists because their common sense tells them the objects have been humanly worked into "crude" tools or intended images. These laypersons have not been prejudiced by formal archaeological training which is narrow and dogmatic in nature. Even though these amateurs will explain the objects come from a concentrated area which makes co-incidence seem statistically unlikely to their intuition, archaelogists don't seem to understand the significance of this observation. Ken Johnston details the too-often outcome of such evaluations by "experts" who unfortunately are not really capable of such evaluations and could be missing the boat on old art in the Americas. N. Clark may be finding indications of a human presence in her locale of Arizona much earlier than mainstream archaeology can admit at this time. Sometimes, such objects are better evaluated by petrologists or geologists who are able to distinguish artificiality from natural forces capably.

Here is a blog established by N. Clark to share more of her finds.

American anthropology must begin to formally, rigerously, evaluate anomalous finds in a scientific manner or they risk losing credibility with their public constituency by lazily explaining all of them away as "lusus naturae."

-kbj

1 comment:

Nell HendersonFebruary 22, 2012 at 2:07 AM
I agree with her,I have been finding and collecting stone art for along time. Searched for some clue on information about it, nothing till I found portable rock art.Thanks
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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

06 February 2012

Artist and rock collector discovers pierre figures near Prescott, Arizona

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