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 June 2012

Ohio mammoth figure stone is combined with human head similar to Washington find 2200 miles away

Ken Johnston find, Licking County, Ohio. A mastodon or mammoth figure in right profile view combined with a human face in left profile view, including radially incised lines.

This figure stone was found on the surface in disturbed soil at a light construction area. Crude tools and lithic debris supporting a former cultural site were also identified. The same site produced a couple of other suspected sculpted stones last year which were subjects of postings on this blog and worth reference here because of their contextual support for the prehistoric intent of an artist to create the imagery I am describing here in this piece. Several other pieces from this site were identified this Spring and will be seen here in the future.

This piece demonstrates a combination of proboscidean imagery with human head and human facial profile imagery as is similarly seen in the posting just prior of the find of Jim May, at Wahougal, Washington. The Ohio find and the Washington find are separated by 2,200 miles, including the Rocky Mountains.

The human mouth line, eye and ear, along with the proboscidean's eye are marked up in this photo. The elephant's tail is also the nose of human face. The sloping trunk profile is seen in the contrast of light and shadow seen in the diagonal line in lower right. (click photos to expand and compare)

I identified what appears to be an expression of a further describable motif I detected on two prior figure stones posted on this blog. It could be named "lion atop prey animal." I highlighted the visual line of the bottom of the feline and its tail in this photo and added an eye for orientation to the animal. The ear and the nose and mouth of the cat are worked features in the stone. The nose and mouth of the lion is also the eye of the elephant. The material is sandstone and it is weathered by time in the elements.

The lion figure head resting on paw as viewed from the reverse side of the stone, like the "Spinx" position.

Side two of the figure stone has two deeply incised lines intersecting and terminating at their intersection to create a distinct "v" form. These markings support the artificiality of this piece.

View from the hilltop site which produced this figure stone. Looking west across the Licking Valley from the western edge of the Appalacian plateau.

-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

06 June 2012

Ohio mammoth figure stone is combined with human head similar to Washington find 2200 miles away

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