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.

12 April 2014

Arkfeld site in Virginia reports portable rock art and carved ivory in current issue of Pleistocene Coalition News

Adam Arkfeld find, near Clear Brook, Virginia, registered site #44FK732

photo from Pleistocene Coalition News, March-April, 2014, issue

Landowner and amateur archaeologist Adam Arkfeld with assistance of Jack Hranicky, RPA (Register of Professional Archaeologists), recently reported on this possible engraved stone among many suspected art objects from the Arkfeld farm site in Pleistocene Coalition News. The art objects described from the site include a suspected (fossil bone) figure with what appears to be a carved horse's head as well as many other horse-like objects.

Without consideration of the possible engraved lines interpreted by Mr. Arkfeld, the overall outline shape of this stone is here interpreted as representing the profile head of a feline joined with the profile head of a bird. The joining of animals in this manner has been described by Paleolithic art author Pietro Gaietto. The feline is facing left and bird is facing right. A markup I made on the photo here illustrates how the two creatures are joined at the back of their heads.

From site #23JP1222 in Missouri in a posting April 5, 2014 on this blog, also interpreted as a feline head looking left joined with a bird head looking right. The Arkfeld site #44FK732 find may be seen as analogous to the site #23JP1222 find.

1 comment:

ADApril 15, 2014 at 2:43 AM
Hi Ken...

It's interesting that Jack Hranicky has now jumped on the portable rock art bandwagon: "Another art form is stone sculpturing, which includes engraving and working limestone into images." When I showed him some good examples of this at a conference in 2005 he laughingly dismissed the possibility. Nice that he's now "discovered" the phenomenon at the Arkfeld site. This promising site certainly deserves professional investigation, including assessment by a qualified geomorphologist, given its problematic stratigraphy. Maybe it's "pre-Clovis", maybe not...

I hope there are more convincing iconographic artifacts in the assemblage than are shown in the article, although the top one shown seems to be at least a real candidate. As seen in the photo, the discontinuities in the rock look natural, but the stone's appearance may well have attracted the attention of someone long ago, inspiring intentional enhancement. Rotated 180 degrees, it seems to have the typical and very common abstract bird-like appearance, with the likewise common protuberance (lighter in color and perhaps artificially abraded here?) at the posterior, often clearly representing another creature emerging egg-like.

An increasingly popular fallacy evident in the article is the notion that extreme simplicity in lithic artifacts equals extreme antiquity. People have always just used whatever is available, as needed. Simple unifacial tools often appear in direct context with artifacts diagnostic as being as recent as Late Prehistoric. Likewise, Figure Stones clearly incorporating "old world" motifs appear in contexts at least as recent as Early Woodland.

Regards, Alan Day
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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

12 April 2014

Arkfeld site in Virginia reports portable rock art and carved ivory in current issue of Pleistocene Coalition News

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