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.

10 May 2012

Hoard #1 and #2 of 7: presented as components of a compound sculpture action scene depicting the feline head taking a bite out of the human head

The Buckeye Lake, Ohio, flint sculpture hoard #1 and #2 as they may have been associated in the Stone Age, where the lion is depicted as taking a bite from the human's head. (click photo to expand)

Coincidentally, sculptures #1 (human head in the round) and #2 (lion head panel) were standing rather close together on their bases on my deck railing when I noticed a concavity on the head was at the right height and size to accept a convex aspect of the lion, its chin. I moved the two sculptures right up against each other and a tight fitting of the two sculptures was made in an apparently designed "ball-in-socket" type relationship. Both sculptures weigh 12lbs. 12lbs. is an anatomically correct weight for a 150lbs. human head. The sculptures are also the same height withing a couple of millimeters.

It is not a coincidence the two sculptures have such a true and tight fit when standing next to each other on their designed bases on a level platform. They create a coherent, dramatic, picture.

It appears the two pieces, found together, were components of a compound sculpture action scene which depicts the lion taking a bite out of the human head. The human head was noted to have what appeared to be the left eye out of its socket and on the cheek of the human face. A line of vertical visual distortion made by grinding down the stone runs along the left side of the human face down to where the chin of the lion nests into it. Therefore, the sculpture may also be an expression of the known "one eye open, one eye closed/missing" motif in world palaeoart.

(click photos to expand)

Later, I learned of the work of early religion and art scholar James B. Harrod, Ph.D. who has described the "predator bite out of the head" as one of the primary memes of early human art. These memes could have persisted for very long periods of time, as is evidenced by the Acheulean handaxe's continued use for one million years. Harrod has aggregated tool and art (and proto-art) data from over 500 old world sites. The large felines have a prominent role in early human ideologies, it seems driven by the paradox of them being both life-givers and life-takers. Lions kill prey and leave carcasses with substantial amounts of nutrition still available to humans and other scavengers. Based on worldwide archaeological data from skeletal remains, 8% or so of early humans were also victims of predation. So, the big cats were big components of the world view of humans who had to contend with them. The movie "The Ghost and The Darkness" is an excellent way to acquaint oneself with the power of lions as it may have been experienced for most of human time. It is based on a true story and is set in British Colonial Africa. The Ghost and The Darkness are now stuffed specimens on display at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History.

A protrusion, like an eyeball out of its place, underneath the left eye socket is circled above. The face is frowning or grimacing with a vertical line of visual distortion on the left side with a white arrow pointing to the place where the lion's chin nests into the human head.

Photo is Copyright (c) Ursel Benekendorff, All Rights Reserved. Do not copy or distribute in any way. Used with permission. This German example of a human head sculpture from the Gross Pampau site also has a vertical line of visual distortion along the left side of the face. A sea urchin fossil serves as the closed or missing left eye. Ursel Benekendorff is a pioneer in the field of Pleistocene rock art and has the largest collection in the world with 2000 photos available for study at her website, Schafftwisen. Benekendorff noted her sculpture has strong inclusion of calcite as I noted with the Ohio, U.S.A. sculpture.

As the subject of an earlier posting, this possible sculpture depicting a lion head with a human head inside it (another example of lion eating human head theme) is from Flint Ridge, about 10 miles from the find location of the Buckeye Lake, Ohio, hoard of seven sculptures.

-kbj

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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

10 May 2012

Hoard #1 and #2 of 7: presented as components of a compound sculpture action scene depicting the feline head taking a bite out of the human head

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