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.

03 April 2015

Human head stone sculpture including a mammoth visage along with tools from the Ice Age Arkfeld site, #44FK732

Human head stone sculpture recovered by Adam Arkfeld, Clear Brook, Virginia.

The sculpture includes a mammoth head facing left in the overall shape of the stone. The upper left of the rock is the "bump" of the mammoth head.

Arkfeld writes: "Interesting features; mouth is another example of fossil utilization. A worm tube has been utilized. Left eye slit is a natural fissure. Right eye slit has been etched into the stone by hand. Its angle matches the left."

Typical Arkfeld site tools along with all the art objects indicate the site may be of great antiquity. However, the archaeology establishment has been unable to comprehend the significance of the finds being made there.

A bias toward flaked tools as the primary indicator of human activity and an ignorance of the importance of crude and opportunistic tools and portable rock art in evaluating archaeology sites leads many to err in thinking objects like these are "just rocks."

A Pleistocene archaeology and rock art scholar with most all of his experience in the "Old World" has called the Arkfeld site "The most remarkable pre-Clovis site in the United States." Hopefully this will not be lost on those who profess to be searching for evidence of the earliest Americans.

The face mask is interpreted here as having the embedded visage of a mammoth in left profile where the mammoth's left eye divot is also the right eye of the human. The tip of the mammoth's trunk is also the mouth of the human. This image is found just inside the overall shape of the rock on its upper left side and may seen as a representation of the mammoth's head bump cresting the human's forehead. This is a motif already described on this blog.

From all of the art we can say "the right eye may have been symbolic of a life portal and the left eye symbolic of a death portal." If so, this piece may be saying "the death eye of the mammoth is the life eye of the human." This notion is compatible with Duncan Caldwell's "Prey-Mother" hypothesis. The death of the mammoth may have been seen as important for human survival.

"Drawing: A human-mammoth hybrid from Les Comparelles Caves in France. Traced from a sketch in Jelinek’s Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Evolution of Man (1975)." (c) Copyright 2015 Brad Lepper and/or The Ohio History Connection, All Rights Reserved.

This kind of human/mammoth combination is seen a good number of postings on this blog and may also be seen in examples of parietal art in Europe.

1 comment:

UnknownApril 5, 2015 at 1:08 PM
The Arkfeld site shows promise and should foster much enthusiasm for professional and amatures alike. If one thing history and pre-history shows us. Its that so called time stamps keep going back farther and farther then originally hypothesized. Its time enthusiasts put pride aside and start looking at the facts. Facts that are being brought from the earth every day at sites like the Arkfeld location.
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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

03 April 2015

Human head stone sculpture including a mammoth visage along with tools from the Ice Age Arkfeld site, #44FK732

1 comment: