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.

15 June 2012

Microart expression of human left facial profile carved on a quartz pebble

Microart expression of human head in left facial profile carved on a quartz pebble.

Avocational archaeologist Allen Deibel find, Mahoning County, Ohio

Please compare the Ohio artifact on the right to the one on the left, a right facial profile, find by Nadia Clark, Prescott, Arizona. They may be representations of similar idealized forms, influenced by the same, or related, cultural traditions. (click photos to expand).

Regarding Homo sapiens neanderthalensis facial structure from fossil skull data is this description from TalkOrigins: "Like erectus, they had a protruding jaw and receding forehead. The chin was usually weak. The midfacial area also protrudes, a feature that is not found in erectus or sapiens and may be an adaptation to cold."

-kbj

4 comments:

NadiaJune 15, 2012 at 11:34 AM
Ah! ah! that's funny!
They do look like they are related.
Maybe it's the same person, the one on the left as a young man, the one on the right as an older man that put on some weight- on his cheeks, nose, mouth.
What do you say? an important trader, explorer, traveller?
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Ken JohnstonJune 15, 2012 at 12:21 PM
I don't think these are individuals, but a form which was repeated, maybe a meme, perhaps a symbol of some kind. We can likely never know what it means, but simply identifying recurring patterns (possible motifs) can in time have meaning to archaeological science. Rather than different ages, I think this perceived difference is because of the use of very different lithic material to make these faces. Additional examples of similar head and face forms will be presented here in the future.
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NadiaJune 18, 2012 at 10:59 AM
All right, my last post was facetious. What would be the odds of finding a depiction of the same person in 2 pebbles so far away from each other?
I understand the value of finding recurring patterns.
As far as faces are concerned, I have found enough differences in the noses, mouths, to make me think that these were more than idealized faces ( in what I have found, I can't generalize here).
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Ken JohnstonJune 18, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Having a handful of examples is a start, but pareidolia can be difficult to be aware of. It takes some number of examples to argue for a recurring pattern. Making the posting may help someone else identify a similar find if they have one. What may be images of real people who lived, or unique people images, are described by archaeologists as "portraits" and are suspected to exist along with idealized human forms.
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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

15 June 2012

Microart expression of human left facial profile carved on a quartz pebble

4 comments: