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.

25 July 2012

American cave with underground river has carvings similar to Koonalda cave, Australia, lattice or grid pattern

Koonalda cave, Australia, carved lattice pattern

Photo © R. Edwards, in L. Maynard and R. Edwards, in Wright, R. V. S. (ed.). 1971. Archaeology of the Gallus Site, Koonalda Cave. Canberra: Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies: Plate 33. More information from originsnet.org

Seneca cavern, Ohio, carved lattice or grid pattern

Although not portable rock art, the grid, or lattice, motif is known to rock art scholars. Its possible presence in the Americas, in Ohio, may provide support for the hypothesis of paleo rock art being found here as well. I noticed two side by side grids in a Bellevue, Ohio, cavern which was present during the Pleistocene. Its surface contact points were plugged with glacial mud during the Wisconsinin glaciation which may have hidden/blocked the cave from human access for some time. The cavern was discovered by two boys rabbit hunting in the mid 19th century who stumbled onto a sinkhole which led to an entry. These grids were on a flat surface which presented a nice "seat" at the edge of a room in the cavern.

If one compares this grid to a profile of the cavern system (last photo), it seems the grid could be a kind of map. There are seven levels to the cavern and seven "ladder sections" in the middle of the grid as seen below.

Seneca cavern 25cm grid with markups highlighting lines. The starts and stops indicate the grid was constructed with deliberation greater than just etching perpendicular lines. There is small amount of modern grafitti in the cavern from the 19th and early 20th centuries before the landowner installed an iron gate. It is along the line of "James loves Harriet." Although there is no way to prove these are prehistoric grids, their underground river context similar to Koonalda's, supports their antiquity.

There were other possible art features in this cave which I plan to return to with better lighting and photography equipment. It seems North American cave art needs to be more thoroughly investigated. The landowner said no one had ever examined Seneca cavern for art before my visit.

A second 15 cm grid was next to the larger grid. (click photos to expand)

A profile map of the Seneca caverns, Bellevue, Ohio

-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

25 July 2012

American cave with underground river has carvings similar to Koonalda cave, Australia, lattice or grid pattern

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