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.

16 August 2012

Stones worked using a buffer technique may be less recognizable expressions of the human aesthetic

A stone with edges trimmed into the desired shape using a buffer technique. From a hilltop site in unglaciated Licking County, Ohio, find by Ken Johnston.

The stone is shaped somewhat like a shell and small shell fossils are visible on one side. The creator may have noticed the fossils when making this artifact.

The famous "West Tofts" decorated handaxe, featuring a fossil

This shell shaped stone from an earlier posting was also worked using a buffer technique. It was found 1/4 mile away from the two pieces featured in this post.

This artifact was found in site association with the first one presented

Find by Houck, Knox County, Ohio, the county north of Licking County. It is attributed to the American Archaic period, from approximately 8000 to 3000 years before present. This is more familiar to our visual senses as created by a human aesthetic. The buffer technique which created the "rough looking" artifacts is not as familiar to us, but I argue the same human sensibilities of proportion and shaping are at work here, just expressed in different stone working technologies. The finely worked flint seems to 'feature' or be centered on the creamy, white stone inclusion. This featuring is similar to the what appears to be shell fossil featuring on two artifacts from the same locale.

An illustration of intentional shaping of this stone using five primary edge lines

Buffer technique illustration:

Illustration © Archaeologische Berichten. Wouters, A., Franssen, C. and Kessels, A. (1981). Typologie van de artefacten van de Chopper Choppingtool Complexen. Archaeologische Berichten 10:19-117. Elst, NL. Fig. 2.

-kbj

2 comments:

lukeAugust 17, 2012 at 11:21 AM
Phi was easier identified by the early human because they were in the thick of the natural world. From the top of the mesa they observed the earth below and sky above.together they marked natures pattern's with stones. In this way the great spirit ways were known.
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UnknownJuly 23, 2015 at 1:27 PM
i love rocks and artifacts. having said that, this portable rock art stuff is, in my opinion, a load of crap! i'm trying to be nice. it seems to me that everyone is seeing what they want to see( like faces of jesus in a streaked up window or the potato chip faces). that or you guys were just high when you found these so called artifacts. i'm in no way an expert and could be completely wrong, but the ridiculousness of these finds and what "experts" say they are supposed to be, to me, is astonishing. it just seems like you all are drinking the same koolaid. i thought primitive peoples were minimalists who carried with them only what was needed to survive. plus the same peoples who supposedly made these portable rock arts had the ability to make quite detailed and much more portable works of art from clay, so again why carry around a 5-10lb rock that looks like nothing but a rock(unless you're high) when you could carry around a much smaller, much lighter, and much more detailed piece of art? just my uneducated opinion.
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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

16 August 2012

Stones worked using a buffer technique may be less recognizable expressions of the human aesthetic

2 comments: