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.

22 May 2014

Arkfeld site "baby mammoth" interpretation is supported by human face masks also incorporated into the sculpture

"Baby mammoth" sculpture identified by Adam Arkfeld, Arkfeld site, #44FK732, Clear Brook, Virginia

The mammoth is seen in black with trunk directed to the right. Stone is approximately 10cm length. The overall shape of the stone may represent the head of another animal, perhaps a bear.

Angie Bean pencil sketch "The Baby Mammoth"

Ken Johnston interprets two human face mask figures incorporated into the posterior of the mammoth, in line with a motif well described by archaeologist Jan van Es, of Roermond, The Netherlands. Regarding another sculpture seen on this blog, van Es writes "In many sculptures of animals (bear, elephant, bison, etc..) is a portrait by the legs visible. Here I see a man's face by the hind legs."

The mask circled on the left is in the "one eye open, other eye shut or missing" motif where the mammoth's rear leg may be seen as "blacking out" the left eye of the mask as if wearing an eye patch or the like.

The mask circled on the right is a smaller relatively "happy face" nested between the mammoth's front and rear legs as this piece presents a Stone Age version of the popularized masks of tragedy and comedy. Perhaps this captures the broad range of human emotion associated with these magnificent animals.

Another mammoth portable rock art form along with Angie Bean's pencil sketch of it.

Baby mammoth, BBC News

close up of Arkfeld "Baby Mammoth"

"Lyuba" the world's best preserved baby mammoth, photo by BBC News

1 comment:

UnknownMay 22, 2014 at 8:47 PM
Ken, I am a regular follower on your site and I am thrilled to know that someone out there is not afraid to post this long suppressed rock art that has so readily been dismissed by the Establishment. I was amazed today to find the two human faces in the baby mammoth, they are undeniable - I missed them at first glance. I read recently that, "the world's largest and most technologically advanced museum is also one of the world's best-kept secrets. It houses more pieces than the Hermitage, the Vatican Museum, and the New York Metropolitan…combined. Yet despite its magnificent collection, few members of the public are ever invited inside its heavily guarded walls." The Smithsonian Institution, despite having more than a dozen massive museums in DC, allows a visitor only a faction of a viewing - maybe 2% - of what has been collected. Where is it all stored, and why is it guarded so heavily?
"To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books." ~ Dan Brown
Thank you for not leaving any stone unturned, and continuing to explore what others have dismissed. ~ DeAnna

May 22, 2014 at 8:45 PM
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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

22 May 2014

Arkfeld site "baby mammoth" interpretation is supported by human face masks also incorporated into the sculpture

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