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.

11 August 2014

Bird figure backs as lithic workbenches

Water bird figure facing left with tool bit protruding from back

Ken Johnston find, Licking County, Ohio.

This is the reverse side with bird figure facing right now.

These two artifacts were found together at Flint Ridge and I have interpreted them as bird figures whose backs were used as small lithic workbenches perhaps similarly to examples originally described by Jan van Es of Roermond, The Netherlands.

Both of these birds' backs is carrying a load of quartz crystals which have been worn down by grinding wear. One of the figures presents a cradling cup-like concave surface which has been smoothed from use and the other presents a convex quartz crystal formation with a protruding wear bit. Both figures have unusually flat bases which are stable under movement and pressure. They were found together at an ancient chert quarry and workshop site at Flint Ridge, Glenford, Ohio, and are essentially the same size.

Ken Johnston find, Licking County, Ohio. Interpreted as a bird with well defined wing facing right and another creature with an eye, perhaps a bird, facing left.

The dip seen on the back of the bird here is a cluster of quartz crystals which has been worn down

The two Licking County, Ohio, artifacts with scale

From OriginsNet.org: "Boukoul workbenches stylized as waterbirds with heads turned backward. A full report on the Boukoulian is given in Van Es, J. and Franssen, C.J.H. (1989). Een vroege microkern-traditie van de Peelhorst het Boukoulien. Archaeologische Berichten 19:6-25;93-133. Elst, NL."

1 comment:

AnonymousSeptember 14, 2014 at 4:14 PM
Hi,I´m Rudi,and I´m coming from the northest part of Germany where so much stonework can be seen in so many different kinds .One part of my daily search is I´m looking for stoneage tools that have been formed in an intelligent way to show persons,figures and animals - it´s true and obviously: the early homo was able to create complicated things by his hands and does it sometimes perfectly ! I´m in contact with an old lady nearby Hamburg.She has her own internet side under schaftwissen.de,there you can see homo-heads,elephants,wales,apes a.o. .Here I have a stone that shows the head of an neanderthal man exactly as he should look like,and I´ve found a big stone that shows an iceage tiger which looks really great.So it´s time for all the scientists of archeology in the world : they should wake up and accept these important things - but they don´t ...it´s a shame ! They ignore these truths and say all these things have not been proved it only exists in man´s phantasy - what a great failure I think,isn´it ?
The stone shown on your picture is fantastic - the bird is clear to be seen ! We have the eyes for such beauties of stonework and I wouldn´t change it - never in my life.
I hope that one day these truths are selfevident.So I´m working for me and write down what I found out as you also do.Thank you for the wonderful pictures and your page here.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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

11 August 2014

Bird figure backs as lithic workbenches

1 comment: