Portrait in exotic green glass from glacial overlook site which produced other art sculptures and flint profiles

Licking County, Ohio, find by Ken Johnston.  

Exotic green glass material has been flaked and retouched to create a likeness of a human head and face in left profile view, where the rough cortex part of the stone is serving as the person's hair. This was not the only item of flint-like material found at this disturbed soil site on a hilltop which produced "Sir Nameless," the Siberian like bird and the elephant/human art pieces.

The green glass here was confirmed to be human manufactured and not a natural rock by a prominent university lithics lab and by others with experience at Corning Glass Corp.

-kbj

Ohio bird figurine similar to a Russian (Siberian) bird identified by archaeologist M.A. Kiriyak at the Bol'shoi El'gakhchan I site

(click photos to expand)

Ohio bird figurine found by Ken Johnston in an art and tool context in Licking County has similarity to a...

... Siberian bird figurine identified by archaeologist M. A. Kiriyak at the Russian Upper Paleolithic Bol'shoi El'gakhchan I site.

I have read archaeologists and art scholars practically lament the "absence of Paleolithic art in the Americas." The Eurocentric and preconceived approach to "art" has the expectation set at "cave paintings like Chauvet" or "Venus" female figurines like the popularized types of the European Gravettian era. Most all of the art of the Paleolithic is farther removed from our own culture and expectations than the well known art of Europe so it is more difficult to perceive in the archaeological record and takes "a new eye" of perception "outside the box" of our normal cultural and visual world. The modalities of North American Paleolithic portable rock art forms can be well informed by work done in Russia by M. A. Kiriyak. Her book "Early Art of the Northern Far East: The Stone Age" has been translated to English by Richard L. Bland of the U.S. National Park Service Shared Beringian Heritage Program in partnership with Russia. A link on the right side panel goes to a preview/purchase web site or you may contact US Government Printing Office bookstore for a copy of the book.  

Beak at left in this view.  I chose not to clean this piece any further in order to maintain some of the context soil and to preserve the "eye" for more controlled study.  The eyes of artifacts such as these may be indicated by creating a depression in the stone and adding pigment or changing the patina.  The presence of an "eye" is often a sign that someone in prehistory made or noticed the bird form and "animated them" with the addition of the eye(s).

Beak at right in this view

link to "Sir Nameless"

Earlier posting of human facial profile sculpture found within a few meters of the bird featured here.  The artificiality of the bird here, despite its seemingly crude and somewhat ambiguous form, is supported by finding a carved human face silhouette sculpture in its immediate proximity.  This is, in fact, what bird figurines of the Stone Age can sometimes look like.

2 pentagonal pitted slabs with peck marks which indicate likely use as tools were found in immediate proximity to the bird figurine featured here

Pitted grinding/pounding stones, similar to an anvil or mortar stone, found in immediate vicinity of the bird figurine

drawing from M. A. Kiriyak page 56 of the Siberian bird figurine

Beak at far left in this view

Here's the Siberian bird figurine once again for comparison to the Ohio example, seen above and below

In this photo, the "beak" of the bird is at far right and the tail is far left.  A faint image of the head of a zoomorphic figure with eye, nose and mouth is emerging from the posterior (far left) of the bird.  See the Day's Knob web site for more information on this recurrent theme in pierres-figures identified there.  The Day's Knob archaeological site, also in Ohio, is about 120km from the find site of the bird here.

-kbj

"Sir Nameless"

 "Sir Nameless" pictured with his shadow.

Silhouette sculpture on stone plaque shows faces on both sides

Licking County, Ohio, find by Ken Johnston and Lyn Niday

This facial profile sculpture is from a newly disturbed soil context from construction activities at a tree park about 5km from Buckeye Lake in southern Licking County, Ohio. The context was sterile of glacial deposits and had only native Ohio bedrock-type limestone and sandstone objects and naturefacts.  The immediate context (3m radius) also produced a couple of crude tools, coarse stone lithic debris and two other suspected art pieces (a bird and a feline) which will be the subjects of future postings on this blog.  "Sir Nameless"- Beautiful, narrow, facial profile sculpture shows faces on both sides, named after the 

Thomas Hardy poem, "The Children and Sir Nameless"

Sir Nameless, once of Athelhall, declared:

"These wretched children romping in my park

Trample the herbage till the soil is bared,

And yap and yell from early morn till dark!

Go keep them harnessed to their set routines:

Thank God I've none to hasten my decay;

For green remembrance there are better means

Than offspring, who but wish their sires away."

Sir Nameless of that mansion said anon:

"To be perpetuate for my mightiness

Sculpture must image me when I am gone."

- He forthwith summoned carvers there express

To shape a figure stretching seven-odd feet

(For he was tall) in alabaster stone,

With shield, and crest, and casque, and word complete:

When done a statelier work was never known.

Three hundred years hied; Church-restorers came,

And, no one of his lineage being traced,

They thought an effigy so large in frame

Best fitted for the floor. There it was placed,

Under the seats for schoolchildren. And they

Kicked out his name, and hobnailed off his nose;

And, as they yawn through sermon-time, they say,

"Who was this old stone man beneath our toes?"

-THE END-

"Sir Nameless" under camera flash illumination

Perhaps statistical mathematical analysis can be brought to bear on the subject of art candidate rocks such as this one.  There are approximately 12 edge lines comprising the profile of the face along the left side of the stone as pictured above.  Each of the edges is in proportionally correct size, shape, grading and angular alignment to compose a human face.  It seems statistically unlikely mother nature could do all the work to make a 12 point face at this level of exquisite detail.  One bad angle, one disproportionately sized edge, would impact the dramatic realism of this high art piece.  A second bad characteristic would have exponential degradation of the visual processing of the image as a "face."  It reminds me of something I read once:  how many bites out of a cutlet does it take before it is no longer a cutlet?  Only a human can sculpt an object like this.  The art and tool context of the find makes artificiality quite certain here.

  

With scale

Side 2 with scale

Thickness of stone plaque seen here