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.

05 October 2015

Second amateur archaeologist reports iconic finds along with tools in the Doe River valley, Carter County, Tennessee

Chris Blumenstock find, Valley Forge, Tennessee

Thought you might like to see these rocks from the Doe River Valley of Carter County Tennessee. I was searching and trying to find out more about them when I found your site. You had several objects from Sherry Hill in Rittertown which is a couple miles upriver from me, here in Valley Forge. The stuff I find is similar. I interpret many of these as being turtle heads. I have humans, bears, birds etc. but more "shouting turtle heads" than anything. There must have been many people living in this valley over the years based on the stuff they left behind... I think some of them were for entertainment, like stone age TV. I've had a lot of time to study these, been finding them for years. Some of them are remarkable feats of workmanship. -Chris Blumenstock

Human head in left 3/4 profile on a pebble identified by Chris. The face details have faded over thousands of years but are still detectable to careful observers like Chris. Nose, mouth, chin, eye, eyebrow and hairline may have been elements of this human portrayal.

The "knife", upper left in the flint photo, looks like a snapping turtle head profile on the right edge and a hominid face profile on the left edge. -Chris

Chris identified this as a possible human-bird combination but I can identify this piece as demonstrating a Paleolithic stone sculpture motif of a combination of a human head profile looking left split with an animal (bovine, likely a woodland musk ox) head in right profile. This 'joining of heads' motif is seen in many examples on this blog and has been described by Paleolithic sculpture researcher Pietro Gaietto of Italy.

Human head facing left, animal head facing right

Ken Johnston illustration of the human head facing left and the animal head facing right. The animal's eye and mouth area are highlighted. This is consistent with Chris's observation about a knife in a photo above: The "knife", upper left in the flint photo, looks like a snapping turtle head profile on the right edge and a hominid face profile on the left edge.

Frame illustrating a Doe River Valley pattern of notched pebbles described by Chris as 'shouting turtle heads.' These forms have also been identified by some other amateur archaeologists in North American portable rock art contexts.

Map showing the Valley Forge, Tennessee find location

Valley Forge, Tennessee, photo by Chris Blumenstock

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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

05 October 2015

Second amateur archaeologist reports iconic finds along with tools in the Doe River valley, Carter County, Tennessee

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