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.

26 June 2015

Acoustic resonance stone horn from the Arkfeld Site provides an extraordinary opportunity to hear the music of the distant past

Acoustic resonance stone horn from the Arkfeld site provides an extraordinary opportunity to hear the music of the distant past (30cm). It may be the oldest known stone musical wind instrument in the world.

In this video Adam Arkfeld demonstrates the acoustic resonance stone horn musical wind instrument he identified and has experimented with at Clear Brook, Virginia. Arkfeld's discovery of the instrument and replication of its use provides an extraordinary opportunity for us to hear the musical sounds of the distant past.

Arkfeld thinks the dark and shiny patina of the horn is evidence of heavy handling by human hands over a long period of time in prehistory. It appears to have "lip wear" around the mouth piece.

The art and tools at the Arkfeld archaeology site suggest a Pleistocene age for the site and this may be the oldest known stone wind instrument in the world. Some dated examples of wind instruments made in bone exceed 30,000 years BP, but portable stone acoustics seems much less common. I have not been able to locate record of another example of a naturally advantageous portable stone which has been humanly modified to create an acoustic wind instrument.

The people at Arkfeld Site were masters of limestone lithic technology and were able to exploit it to make the entire range of stone tools they needed, along with many art objects and now we know: musical instruments. This artifact speaks to the durability of the ancient peoples at the site and their profound intimacy with the natural materials available to them.

Side 1 with mouth piece

The mouth piece was enhanced by stone removal and accepts human lips perfectly

Side 2. A cupped or flat hand on the side opposite the mouthpiece allows one to manipulate the sound vibrations from the horn. The stone appears to have been modified to optimize air flow and vibration qualities.

The wind vent and sound holes illustrated, click photo to expand. The sound hole 1 has a shape reminiscent of the f-shaped sound holes found on violins. Sound hole 2 is connected to sound hole 1 but neither are directly connected to the wind flow from the mouth piece coming out of the vent.

"Though the purpose of sound holes is to help acoustic instruments project their sound more efficiently, the sound does not emanate solely (nor even mostly) from the location of the sound hole. The majority of sound emanates from the surface area of both sounding boards, with sound holes playing a part by allowing the sounding boards to vibrate more freely, and by allowing some of the vibrations which have been set in motion inside the instrument to travel outside the instrument."

Side 2. The stone has a look of two animal heads at the opposite ends looking away from each other. Adam Arkfeld says they somewhat resemble seals. Could it be a seal-horn?

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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

26 June 2015

Acoustic resonance stone horn from the Arkfeld Site provides an extraordinary opportunity to hear the music of the distant past

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