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.

19 April 2015

Pietro Gaietto describes the very early origin of what have been called PAC-MAN like anthropomorphic sculptures as "The shout of Homo erectus"

"The Man of the Romandato" find by Paleolithic art author Pietro Gaietto

Gaietto writes: "Fig. 4.9) Lithic Sculpture. It represents the head of a hominid with great opened wide mouth.
Size: Height cm. 23.5, width cm. 29, width cm. 18.5. The mouth is wide cm. 17 in the inside and cm. 7 in the tip of the jaw, and is deep cm. 11. Obtained from a large nodule of silex. Weight kg. 11.5.
Place of originrigin: Torrent Romandato, Rodi Garganico, Foggia, Italy.
Material culture: Acheulean or middle Clactonian, or perhaps more recent.
The sculpture has been obtained from a nodule of silex, in which the cavity that constitutes the open mouth is part of the shape original of the nodule.
The strong expression has been interpreted in the typology like " scream ". The stylistic deformation is based, exactly, on the scream.
A study on this sculpture and others two similar, by Pietro Gaietto, (Fig. 4.7 and 4.10) entitled " The shout of Homo erectus " is published on " Paleolithic Art Magazine ",(2000).

Collection Museum of the Origins of Man.

"The man of Spinacchi" find by Pietro Gaietto

ANTHROPOMORPHIC PALEOLITHIC SCULPTURE by Pietro Gaietto, Genoa, Italy

Texas ranch owner becomes yet another United States site reporting PAC-MAN like stone figures in portable rock art contexts

Last week I received a note from a Texas ranch owner which included the following. I added the emphasis in bold type.

"There is a huge limestone rock approx 75 lb with a big centipede fossil stretching across the entire rock. Near that rock are massive metates weighing over 200 lb. I found a Metate/mortar weighing approx 30 lb that had a lot of wear and in the middle of the bowl are two perfectly drilled holes about 4 inches apart that go all the way thru the rock. I'm guessing it's for drainage which is interesting as I've never seen a Metate with holes. Near that Metate I found a large piece or nodular flint with the bottom being completely flat to where it can stand up perfectly. After examining the rock I noticed that it was one large owl statue with a lot of smaller owl faces that look almost subliminal. Every single rock I pick up in this area, no matter if it's limestone, flint or quartz, has some kind of art on it. Every single one. Mostly owls, buffaloes and weird faces.

You're going to think this is weird but I have found a couple of these faces that look exactly like pac-man. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen.

I think this was a worship or ceremony site as it's unlike anything I've ever seen. I think it's possible they were worshiping that centipede fossil. Anyways, I just want to thank you because I thought I was losing my mind until I ran across your site. There's not much online that covers this subject except for you. Just wanted to say thanks and see if you might have any insight or if you've ever heard of anything like this?" -Texas ranch owner

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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.

Archaeology of Portable Rock Art

Denisovan Ancestry in East Eurasian and Native American Populations

19 April 2015

Pietro Gaietto describes the very early origin of what have been called PAC-MAN like anthropomorphic sculptures as "The shout of Homo erectus"

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