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.

21 August 2016

Landscapers inadvertently return probable large mammoth sculpture to its original upright position

Ken Johnston Paleolithic art mammoth sculpture find, Licking County, Ohio

'Mammoth left profile'

This probable Ice Age mammoth rock art sculpture is about 30 inches tall, is slender and stands upon a flat base which presents the animal figure in the correct upright position.

Side 1

Side 2

Side 1 from front

Side 2 from front

The stone is a flake off a large boulder. Its perimeter has been shaped to sculpt the profile of the body of a mammoth. A complete petrological examination will confirm this as a humanly-shaped portable rock art sculpture.

Modern day landscapers were attracted to this stone because of its thinness and ability to stand upright on a flat base. They encountered this stone when restoring a garden and decided to make it a part of the visual interest of a stream confluence construction. There is a boulder next to the mammoth sculpture but it is not propping up the mammoth stone and does not appear related to it.

This view favors the posterior of the mammoth sculpture

Faint trace of a possible zooanthropomorphic right facial profile on the posterior of the mammoth sculpture is in line with other examples from this place like seen in the last posting. There is possible evidence of some focused grinding to create an 'eye divot' seen as a whitish spot.

This stone presents a striking mammoth likeness which I propose was cultivated in the Ice Age and left for landscapers to discover and then prop up this year. It makes an ideal "standing stone." I was able to recognize it as a potentially significant portable rock art sculpture. The context here is strong, directly on the maximum geographic extent of the Wisconsinan glaciation. I have found other mammoth figures here as well as innumerable coarse stone tools.

Prior posting mammoth and human combination sculpture found just a few hundred yards from the probable mammoth sculpture featured here.

Human facial profile with mammoth head cresting forehead from this site

Human facial profile with mammoth head cresting forehead from this site. This is the only piece of Flint Ridge flint I have found on this 1,000+ acre site despite its being located just 5 miles from this famous chert quarry location.

Sample of the coarse stone tools which are found by the thousands at this site

Restoration of this landscape garden in Licking County, Ohio, on private property is the reason the large mammoth sculpture became visible again after its "Ice Age life." It is located just to the right of this scene photographed the same day I noticed the sculpture.

This boulder with a natural right edge approximating the curvature of a mammoth trunk was featured earlier on this blog. It was found just two miles from the mammoth in this posting and in the same watershed. It has a crude sculpted face on its posterior which supports the proposition of boulder-size mammoth sculptures in this locality.

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

21 August 2016

Landscapers inadvertently return probable large mammoth sculpture to its original upright position

No comments:

Post a Comment