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.

15 April 2013

Vultures viewed from behind, looking left, with egg icons and face icons on posteriors seen in Beegden, The Netherlands, and Piney Point, Maryland, figures

(left) archaeologist Jan van Es bird figure, Beegden site, The Netherlands, and (right) Mark Jones find, Piney Point, Maryland.

I note a remarkable image similarity in these two artifacts. Buzzards or vultures viewed from behind, their heads looking left, with egg icons and face icons on the birds' posteriors.

The face identified by Mark Jones on the artifact at right is defined at its top by two non-linear parallel lines, almost as if to indicate the front hair line. Two eyes and a mouth are under that. A very, very, faint face icon may also be present in a similar location on the Dutch artifact.

van Es outlines the bird and egg from the Beegdgen site and indicates the symbolic egg at the posterior of the bird, in the tail feather area, with tiny yellow speckles

I made a quick measurement on my photo edit screen (not measurements of the artifacts directly but using the photographic images) and got the values of 4 and 6.5cm for the ovate form on the back of the Mark Jones, Piney Point, Maryland figure stone. It thus expresses measurement ratios approximating Phi, or the Golden Ratio (6.5 / 4 = 1.625). A similar analysis of the van Es bird form shows 8cm / 5cm = 1.6, also approximating Phi.

American Turkey Vulture, John James Audubon

Very faint traces of a simple face may be present in the vulture tail area of the Beegden, The Netherlands, figure, just like the example from Maryland. (Click photos to expand and toggle back and forth.)

When rotated 180 degrees, the Dutch bird figure even more so resembles a human thumb. This likeness may have been perceived as significant by the stone's finder and may explain why it was chosen to express the bird and egg/face imagery by slightly modifying the stone.

-kbj

1 comment:

AnonymousMay 12, 2013 at 4:32 PM
Consider the face: consider that this might be a figure of a woman giving birth....I have several female/maternity stones. This closely resembles the one I have with a distended belly... and legs to the knees.
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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

15 April 2013

Vultures viewed from behind, looking left, with egg icons and face icons on posteriors seen in Beegden, The Netherlands, and Piney Point, Maryland, figures

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