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 May 2014

A "Feline in Lordosis" sculpture from the Spout Run archaeological site in Bluemont, Virginia

Feline in Lordosis sculpture at Spout Run

From the Spout Run archaeological site, Bluemont, Virginia.

The cat is in silhouette facing left here. It may be encrusted with remnants of a red ochre based pigment.

I found the "Feline in Lordosis" sculpture within about 10 minutes at the Spout Run site. Like the nearby Arkfeld site, this place will likely produce even many more examples of portable rock art in the future. The photos here suggest a rabbit likeness to some who have viewed them. Because of the age and weathering of the artifacts and our lack of all the cultural background including visual cues of the past, exact interpretations of animals are often difficult. Based on my experience, I believe the sculpture was made based on familiarity with, and significance given to, the mating behaviors of felines.

American house cat in feline lordosis position

Pigmented Feline in Lordosis, side 2, facing right. The cat's posterior is depicted as raised at the left end of the figure here, ears folded down and leg forward in a display to indicate readiness to copulate. The figure is about 14cm long.

Chris and René White discovered the Spout Run site on their property. Here, Chris shows a stone bear figure he has identified. Having taken bear himself from the property, he is personally very familiar with their appearance and imagery. (photo from the Winchester Star)

Bear and bear head figures identified by Chris

A flaked anthropomorphic face mask figure identified by Chris. I think it is possible the crested dome of a mammoth head is incorporated into the forehead of the human in this "tall face" depiction. This "shared human forehead with mammoth" is seen in other examples on this blog.

René and Chris White survey part of the concentric circles stone works identified at the Spout Run site. A piece of burned jasper from the site was dated at 10,470 years before present so it provides some limited contextual information supporting a Paleolithic human presence at the site location. (photo from the Winchester Star)

Stone likeness of a mammoth identified by Chris White at Spout Run. The mammoth figure has six vertical marks on its side which could be human made. There are three on the front half of the animal and three on the back half. Other possible mammoth figures have been identified and will be featured on this blog in the future.

Spout Run, a tributary creek of the Shenandoah River, flows through Chris and Rene's property and the stone works and portable rock art finds are located just adjacent.

Spout Run archaeological site is about 17 miles as the crow flies from the Arkfeld farm archaeological site featured recently on this blog. The respective site owners are working together to document suspected tools and portable rock art objects and have already noticed significant similarities in lithic materials from the sites.

1 comment:

lukeMay 14, 2014 at 11:22 PM
both the running rabbit and cat r side profile but the cat cat turns its head for a front profile, like the pic u got . on side two the gators side profile head gets the rabbit side profile with the rabbit turning its head front profile with its last look before its gone. side 2 also makes the horned owl head front profile, thats just some of the pics,
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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 May 2014

A "Feline in Lordosis" sculpture from the Spout Run archaeological site in Bluemont, Virginia

From the Spout Run archaeological site, Bluemont, Virginia.

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