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.

17 August 2015

Miles Point, Talbott County, Maryland, site tool assemblege 'anvil' dated at ca. 21,000 BP should be investigated as a possible human head paleosculpture

Ken Johnston interpreted human head sculpture in typical left 3/4 profile

Darrin L. Lowery find, Miles Point, Talbott County Maryland, 2006. Radio carbon dated by soil context to 21,000 BP.

The 'anvil' in situ with associated tools. It immediately struck me as resembling a human head form typical in portable rock art. It was left with these other stone objects and covered by loess. The Smithsonian Institution has described the find as a related assemblage.

Here is a video featuring the head in left 3/4 profile seen in the 'anvil' discovered in a Paleolithic tool context by now Dr. Lowery. You may enter the video at 22:17 and get an introduction to this find by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution.

The archaeological site has since been physically destroyed by the landowner. If the Smithsonian Institution or Dr. Lowery has the anvil stone, it should be evaluated as a possibly sculpted human head likeness.

It is also just as possible it was used as an anvil- it could have been a decorated tool incorporating iconography into a functional piece.

Here is the anvil (sculpture) with an illustration of the interpreted human head left 3/4 profile features which could be evaluated for artificiality.

Depending on how one focuses visual attention on features of the stone, it is possible to interpret a second face looking straight on with a frowning mouth and possible human depiction of the motif 'lion taking a bite of the head with damage or removal of the left eye and the distortion of injury to the left side of the face.'

A piece like this may be seen as including a neutral or content facial expression and an expression of an unhappy one. This is seen in other examples on this blog.

In this example from Flint Ridge, Ohio, two human facial profiles are worked on the same stone. This is a real bi-face!

The first may be interpreted as a content or even smiling face and the second on the reverse side may be interpreted as frowning or grimacing. (Click photos to expand.) It is my hypothesis this motif may be depicting the human condition before and after a symbolic lion bite to the head. The lion aspect is seen more explicitly in other postings on this blog and this motif is related to two important 'Old World' palaeoart memes as described by Dr. James Harrod at originsnet.org.

The Miles Point, Maryland, anvil stone may have been an object imbued with symbolism which was important to its makers. The combined happy and frowning face masks have also been seen here in two sculptures from the Arkfeld Site in Clear Brook, Virginia.

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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

17 August 2015

Miles Point, Talbott County, Maryland, site tool assemblege 'anvil' dated at ca. 21,000 BP should be investigated as a possible human head paleosculpture

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