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.

05 April 2013

Oregonian identifies examples of "one eye open, one eye shut or missing" portable rock art motif originating in the European Lower Paleolithic

Nona Axsom finds, Portland, Oregon

Nona has noticed the recurring pattern of rocks from her garden with crude faces with one eye open, one eye shut. This cultural meme originated in the Lower Paleolithic and continued for tens of thousands of years at least into the Middle Paleolithic. Evidence of it in America is seen from coast-to-coast, so it may be an indicator of a broad population of some of the earliest peoples in the Americas.

This figure from Nona's garden digging is similar to an Ohio find from Licking County investigated and documented by Alan Day.

-kbj

1 comment:

Alan DayApril 6, 2013 at 1:48 AM
Hi Ken...

Nice piece (referring to the top photo). I'm increaingly cautious in blathering about what I see in photos, but would suggest that here another typical feature may be present integrated with the open(?) eye, namely a secondary frontal simple face topped by an angled/forward-facing creature over the forehead. Reinforcing this impression is the naturalistic-looking right (viewer's left) eye - proper shape and with iris.

Regarding the Rick Prince stone (Licking County, Ohio), on my long list of things I must do is looking at this in person and under the microscope to see if traces of the supposedly removed encasing shale remain. If they seem to be present, I'd like to run the piece past my main (and very conservative) rock consultant (petrologist / geology prof) for his assessment. By now I have no problem with simple iconography in stones of great antiquity, but an artifact embedded in shale deposited 325 million years ago strains even my credulity, given the apparent geological impossibility.

While I'm here - you might take a look at http://www.daysknob.com/AS.htm where I show a couple finds by Mr. Alan Skelly in the creek below Ohio's Great Serpent Mound. One of these is presented in all its polymorphic glory. (He brought me several containers of excellent material for inspection, and gave me two nice pieces, only one of which I have had time to photograph and post.) And speaking of the Serpent, Dr. William Romain demonstrated in a recent presentation that he and his team, who have conducted the first professionally executed retrieval and dating of charcoal from that structure, have convincing evidence that the structure was built by the Adena rather than by people of the Fort Ancient culture, who occupied the site about 1400 years later and left datable material in a shallower stratum, leading the Ohio Historical Society archaeologists to loudly trumpet their currently widely accepted "discovery" that the Fort Ancient people built the Serpent.

Regards, Alan

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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

05 April 2013

Oregonian identifies examples of "one eye open, one eye shut or missing" portable rock art motif originating in the European Lower Paleolithic

1 comment: