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.

11 March 2013

Face on possible oversized tool form, along with customized presentation base, indicates it had symbolic significance

Doris Avery find, Lairdsville, Pennsylvania, on the Susquehana River, early 1960's

The sculpture is 34cm tall without the base

The sculpture's associated presentation base

Phillip Avery writes, "My mother found this face and base back in the early sixties along a creek in Lairdsville Pa. It has been in our family since then and it was always assumed to be an Indian mortar and pestle of some sort.

I'm writing to you in hopes of finding out more about it and hope you can give me your opinion and/or direct me to someone that may know more.

To me the nose and eyes look like possible fire starting holes but then there is the mouth and the odd hole at the top. The interesting thing to me is that all edges of the stone are natural, not carved. For some reason it appears that whoever made this did not want to compromise the integrity of the stone. They actually carved the base stand to fit the natural contours of the face stone, not an easy task. That makes me think this may have had some sort of religious or magical significance...is it an idol of some sort or symbol of something? I suspect this may be much older and may not be an Indian artifact at all.

They did a superb job smoothing and leveling the bottom of the base and even added some very straight decorative grooves on the one side. She found the face first, then found the base about 10 to 15 feet farther down the steam. I too was amazed she found both parts. We always hunted arrowheads in the area and the small valley where this was found was inhabited by Indians for a very long time. This face however isn't anything like any other Indian artifact I've ever found. If you put it up, it was found in the early sixties in Lairdsville, PA along the Susquehanna river by Doris Avery. I'm her youngest son Phillip Avery and can be reached at Plavery85@verizon.net if anyone has any more information regarding it."

A Licking County, Ohio, hand held tool with bit at top has an overall shape similar to the teardrop form of the Acheulean Handaxe. This form reminds me of the Susquehana River find. If it were a functional tool, it would be a mega-fauna style bone crusher, raised by both hands with the pointed bit end down. It has a thumb indent, or partial groove, seen of the left edge with a corresponding "bump" on the opposite side to split the fingers.

A side-by-side comparison of the two artifacts, Susquehana River, Pennsylvania, at left, Buckeye Lake, Ohio, at right

-kbj

No comments:

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

11 March 2013

Face on possible oversized tool form, along with customized presentation base, indicates it had symbolic significance

No comments:

Post a Comment