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.

27 August 2012

Tira Vanichtheeranont of Thailand has found what could be a morphological analog to art in Western European and American "human/bird/egg" motif

Tira Vanichtheeranont find from the ground of the cave in Kanchanburi, Thailand

(click photos to expand view)

This piece with anthropomorphic visual qualities was found in the context of a life size stone face mask to be seen soon on this blog. Whether this object is a curated naturefact, or an artifact (human modified), is not as important as the context and similarities to other suspected culturally mediated forms from amateur identified prehistoric cultural sites around the world. This author thinks some artifactuality is present here, but difficult to detect because of its subtlety, the rock material, and its age since human deposition.

Italian example. Photo is (c) Copyright Pietro Gaietto, Museum of the Origins of Man

Italian Paleolithic sculpture author Pietro Gaietto identifies this as a sculpture of the human head. The "human/bird/egg" may be seen here from Italy. Gaietto suggests a possible depiction in these forms are faces of humans with the disease Ecromagaly. It currently occurs in a rate of 1 person of 20,000.

Thailand article with scale

Archaeologist Jan van Es of The Netherlands has described this form, and suggests that the facial edge line may also be interpreted as a female body outline, where the nose is the bust and the mouth is the vulva issuing forth life, in the form of the cosmic egg/chin.

Archaeologist Jimmy Groen of The Netherlands found this portable rock art face in the Belgian Kempen region in soils dated to 450,000 to 300,000 years before present. It has been interpreted by Ken Johnston as a polymorphic "art" piece which implies language and an ability to construct a 'world view,' or ideology, in Archaic sapiens. It also exquisitely exemplifies the egg/chin combination.

Thailand face side 2

American example from Day's Knob, Guernsey County, Ohio. Find and photo and illustration by Alan Day, the landowner. This "human/bird/egg" motif was first described in America by Alan as seen in these two stone faces with zooanthropomorphic forms incorporated into the chin and many other figure stones from his site #33GU218 (Ohio archaeological inventory).

Here is a link to another recent posting from Tira's Thailand finds.

-kbj

1 comment:

UnknownSeptember 7, 2012 at 12:03 AM
Ken,
I believe this rock contains other hidden art. In addition to the image that is obvious, I see two faces with a side profile at the top of the rock looking up. I also see an animal on the left side of the rock...probably a bear...looking to the left. About one inch to the right of the eye, there seem to be small figures/images... that appear to be babies. I have seen this kind of art on some of my rocks.
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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

27 August 2012

Tira Vanichtheeranont of Thailand has found what could be a morphological analog to art in Western European and American "human/bird/egg" motif

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