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.

01 August 2012

Author R. Dale Guthrie has reconstructed "lion taking bite of human head" scene from portable rock at Gourdan, France, supporting Ohio hoard compound sculpture hypothesis

The Buckeye Lake, Ohio, Paleolithic sculpture hoard's figures #1 and #2, of 7 total found together, had been thought to be a compound sculpture where the two depictions, a human head in the round and a lion head panel, were designed to be combined to depict an action scene of the lion taking a bite from the human's head. The Guthrie reconstruction of this same action scene being depicted on a portable rock art piece from Gourdan, France, supports this idea. The human in the Ohio sculpture set is even depicted as glancing away in the same manner as the human in Guthrie's drawing below.

Illustration of "the drawing's most likely intent" by R. Dale Guthrie, artifact from Gourdan Paleolithic site, France. (click photos to expand)

James Harrod, Ph.D., is a religion scholar who has written extensively about the role of early art and symbolism outside North America. In his paper "Four Memes in the Two Million Year Evolution of Symbol, Metaphor and Myth" presented at Harvard University in October 2010, Harrod describes the "bite of predator to the human head" as a primary Oldowan meme. It is based on the first ethos which Harrod describes as a product of the complex and paradoxical relationships of humans, predators, and scavengers. For example, humans appreciate the prey of the lion which has been left with flesh and marrow to provide sustenance, while at the same time they dread being snuck up on from behind and becoming a prey victim of the "provider." This meme may have persisted since Oldowan times, or it could have arisen at different times in human prehistory because of the role of the lion as apex predator and the human role as both dependent on, and prey of, the big cats.

Here are links to the original blog postings made about the human head in the round and the lion head panel.

Image from page 175, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, R. Dale Guthrie

Click here for more on this book

-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

01 August 2012

Author R. Dale Guthrie has reconstructed "lion taking bite of human head" scene from portable rock at Gourdan, France, supporting Ohio hoard compound sculpture hypothesis

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