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.

24 May 2015

Day's Knob, Ohio site #33GU218, reports two new figure stone finds

Alan Day find, Day's Knob, Guernsey County, Ohio

"Here are two nice new limestone Figure Stone finds from my site in Ohio, same provenience, roughly 25 cm below the current terrain surface. In the larger piece, note the incorporation of both utility and imagery that is common at this site." - Alan Day

Alan Day demonstrates the utilitarian aspect of the figure. Day says rock art researcher Mrs. Ursel Benekendorff of Hamburg, Germany, has suggested this pointed end of the sculpture may have been used to plant it in the ground at varying locations.

Ken Johnston interpretation of a bird head mixed in with the female figure

The female figure may also incorporate bird imagery. The bottom of the woman's legs may be seen as the beak of a goose-like flying water bird. There is a circular bas relief "eye" in a more or less anatomically correct position for such a bird figure.

Canada Goose head while in flight

This is a statue from the Day's Knob site earlier interpreted by Alan Day as a "bird-venus" sculpture invoking both human feminine and bird-like qualities.

Figure stone number two recently recovered at Day's Knob.

While it may initially appear amorphous, when taken in context with other limestone figures from the site it presents a familiar iconography. Day has confirmed human agency on a number of figures from his site by consulting with a geologic petrologist.

Day's Knob archaeological site location of recent finds

(left) This tiny female figurine comes from 6500 BP. It is found on the Po plain in Northern Italy and measures 6 cm. Thanks to the tapered lower body the figurine can easily be inserted into the ground. The Lady wears a fertility girdle and a red chain. She has short arms and a small head with long hair or a veil. Source: Venus is geen Vamp, Annine van der Meer. Ohio female figure is at right.

(left two panels) The 'Woman with Goitre' from Grimaldi Italy was found between 3 and 4.2 m deep in a layer which is probably the Epigravettian. A radiocarbon date of 14,110+/-150 BP. From Don's Maps. Photo: Randall White, Source: White (2002), Day's Knob, Ohio, USA, artifact at right.

2 comments:

ADMay 24, 2015 at 11:24 PM
Hi Ken...

Thanks for the nice presentation of my latest finds. These were quite serendipitous, just stumbled upon a couple weeks ago while I was showing the professional archaeologist and another fellow now working here the bank at the edge of the part of the site that was destroyed by 20th. century limestone quarrying.

I will eventually show more photos ot the pretty lady on my own long-neglected web site (along with a lot of other stuff). Since the photos shown here are from an email to numerous people, I didn't go into the details, but you're spot on in noticing the bird imagery. Indeed it's the classic "Bird-Venus" motif I identified here several years ago: When rotated 90 ° (clockwise in this case) the figure becomes a flying bird. Common enough, but this piece is exciting (to me, anyway) in that it bears a very close resemblance to the Paleolithic European "Venuses" right down to the pointed base. (Do a Google image search on "Paleolithic Venus" to see what I mean.) Apparently this is one of quite a few Primal Imagery themes that covered a lot of territory (likely generally west-to-east) over many millennia. (Tentatively I'm thinking the material in this stratum here is likely generalized Archaic Period in age, possibly older.)

Other weathered imagery at the tip of the base corresponds to my proposed widespread "Creature from Posterior" motif. And elsewhere on this piece are the very common subparallel incision lines that have been around pretty much forever.

Ursel Benekendorff just emailed me her insightful conjecture that the pointed base facilitated mounting the figure in the ground. (Analogous, I guess, to the pointed bases on our stupid little solar-charged garden lanterns.)

Regards, Alan Day
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UnknownJuly 30, 2015 at 2:31 AM
I have been finding some fine pieces of art and would like to know more about the things that I am finding.
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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

24 May 2015

Day's Knob, Ohio site #33GU218, reports two new figure stone finds

2 comments: