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.

28 July 2016

France carving of 'male reindeer bellowing during the rutting season' may have been made on a plaque in the shape of a mammoth body profile with a human face on its posterior as seen in North America

From Abri de la Madeleine, France, Magdalenian, 17,000 to 12,000 years before present

Photos by and courtesy of Don Hitchcock who has an excellent web site featuring the art from la Madeleine and many other "Old World" archaeology sites. If you are unable to see the reindeer carving here, a higher resolution photo is available at Don's web site.

This stone has a detailed etching of a reindeer on it and I have recognized its overall shape is very likely symbolic and represents a mammoth body in left profile with a human face profile on its posterior. This motif is seen in many North American examples featured on this blog like this one and this one from Virginia's Arkfeld Site. This places this art motif on two continents.

The method of stonework is different from that used to create the reindeer but faint traces of it still remain. The 'head bump' of the mammoth may be seen along with curvature of its 'trunk' on the left side.

On the right side, the human face profile has etching and stone removal to define facial features and what appears to be a nicely ground 'eye.'

Illustration of Ken Johnston interpretation of the human face profile on the posterior of the mammoth. Click photos to expand and toggle between the illustrated and non-illustrated photos.

Source: Original, Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, 2014

Illustration of the carving 'Male reindeer bellowing during the rutting season' which I propose was made on a mammoth and human combination art plaque.

Here, I processed the photo digitally with the Image-J rock art plug in D-stretch and one of the files generated made the reindeer carving more visible on the plaque. Thanks to the plug-in creator Jon Harman for making this tool available to amateurs for free.

Within the overall frame of the mammoth and human profile, another mammoth has been created by this artist. This mammoth has a trunk line etched into the stone and its head follows the head of the larger mammoth. The mammoth 'eye' element on the stone is also the optimal 'kill point' for a spear to penetrate the reindeer.

The mammoth and human combination silhouette may be interpreted as "special framing" for the image of the reindeer in this case.

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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

28 July 2016

France carving of 'male reindeer bellowing during the rutting season' may have been made on a plaque in the shape of a mammoth body profile with a human face on its posterior as seen in North America

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