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.

12 May 2016

Opposing animal heads, human heads and birds makes six creatures on a quartz crystal-studded figure stone from Flint Ridge

Ken Johnston find, Flint Ridge, Licking County, Ohio

Animal 1 is interpreted as a 'horse head looking left' where the crystals serve as the horse's mane. The arrows illustrate the interpreted 'sight lines' of the horse and human head profile figures.

Detail of the human head 1 in left profile at within the 'neck' of the horse head figure.

Side 2. Stone measures 6,3.5cm

Side 2 interpreted 'feline head looking right' with, again, the human head as its 'neck.' The arrows illustrate the interpreted 'sight lines' of the creatures.

Side 2 human head left profile detail. It has a deliberate removal in the place for an 'eye' and the back of the head is beveled to round it off.

View of the interpreted feline head with illustration showing approximate locations of eyes and mouth on the figure.

Feline head in another perspective

View from TOP. The 'feline' is on the ground crystals side and the horse is on the side with the crystals untouched. The crystals seem to have been removed from the view of the feline's head but retained to serve as the 'mane' of the horse figure.

When the horse head figure is rotated 90 degrees left a bird figure with faint eyes and resembling an owl may be seen. The human is seen as looking skyward to the left at the bottom of the stone in this perspective.

Bird number 2 becomes visible when the feline head is rotated 180 degrees. It has a long beak and hunched back like a vulture's.

In summary,

The piece is an artifact with evidence of focused human retouch action all over it.

It was found in strong context of other figurative pieces seen on this blog which incorporate natural quartz crystal formations in the stone.

It has no apparent use wear as a tool and no tool attributes I can detect.

It has quartz crystals attached to the flint which would have made the raw material attractive for an object designed for visual properties.

There are two zoomorphic forms on opposite sides of the stone. The animals share 'mouths' along a bi-facial edge on the sculpture.

There are two anthropomorphic head forms on opposite sides of the stone. Like the animals, the humans share 'mouths' along a bi-facial edge on the sculpture.

The piece includes the known Paleolithic art motif of combining the heads of humans and animals- and does so twice.

In a third visage of the stone in a vertical position is a likely intended long-beaked bird figure.

In a fourth visage of the stone of the opposite side in a vertical position is a second bird figure.

This makes a total of six creatures represented on this one extraordinary flint figure stone. The artist's pairing of a feline with a horse could be a recognition of their predator-prey relationship or even an appreciation for the feline's work at delivering horse kills to scavenge.

Perhaps horses were desired for felines so felines would be less likely to predate on humans. We can only speculate with futility on the specifics but we can indeed recognize what must have been visual patterns of meaning in portable rock art from the past.

An African Cheetah and a Przewalski's wild Asian horse lounging at The Wilds conservation preserve in south east Ohio may be as close to the 'lion/horse drama' of the Ohio Ice Age which we can observe here today. Ken Johnston photos, Cumberland, Ohio, May 7, 2016.

A Levallois-like blade and pointed scraper found at the Flint Ridge location of portable rock art finds supports the idea of the presence of a Middle Paleolithic-based art and tool complex. The pointed scraper has evidence of use wear consistent with animal hide or soft tissue processing.

No comments:

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

12 May 2016

Opposing animal heads, human heads and birds makes six creatures on a quartz crystal-studded figure stone from Flint Ridge

No comments:

Post a Comment