Lion head flint sculpture from Wimereux, France

Lion head sculpture looking left from Wimereux, France, find by Charles Belart, presented at his web site here

Note the indent serving as the lion's eye and the attention to removing the stone's cortex, or rind, to define the ear in the upper right of the sculpture. Mr. Belart describes all the human actions on this flint to demonstrate the artist's intent to create a symbolic piece.

Stone work on the object establishes it as an artifact

Side 2 view presents a possible depiction in profile form of a wisent where its head is at left, and its rear legs are "off the ground" in this photo's orientation. The bison-like form is a simple reversal of the lion head form but this kind of double meaning is seen throughout palaeoart and is possible here.

Here is the first lion head of several which I have identified from Ohio. I made markups to orient the viewer to the lion image. This lion head weighs 12 lbs. and stands upright on a flat base. (Click photos to expand and compare).

-kbj

Bison flint sculpture

Ken Johnston find, interpretation as "Bison flint sculpture", Licking County, Ohio

This is interpreted as a polyiconic sculpture combining probable lion head and bison forms. The viewer may turn the figure stone 180 degrees to present the visage of each animal. Above is the "bison view." The bison is depicted looking backward to it's posterior.

The bison sculpture turned 180 degrees. The cartoonish animal head is depicted facing right with its exaggerated nose turned up in the air.

This animal head is quite ambiguous. My interpretation of a lion's head is based on a pattern of other probable sculpted lion heads found in the same locale and documented by others who study palaeoart. However, some aspects of this head seem to portray "bear," especially the upturned nose which is topped by a layer of quartz crystals. Also, the mouth is more bear-like than the feline-like mouths seen in the other sculptures.

Depiction of probable lion head in right profile exploits a ring-shaped crystal inclusion as the animal's eye (please click photo to expand view)

Material is Vanport chert, Flint Ridge, Glenford, Licking County, Ohio.

The arrows illustrate the depicted gaze of the flint bison toward its rear (click photos to expand)

Cave art from Lascaux, France, with Jan van Es markup of an arrow indicating the bison's rearward gaze

Side 2 of the sculpture shown with scale shows how crystal inclusions may have been important in the selection of sculpture media. The bottom edge in this photo is a heavy duty sharp edge which may have served a purpose as a tool.

Archaeologist Jan van Es of The Netherlands interprets two fish forms in the sculpture. The first is seen in the overall outline of the "lion's head" where the lion's mouth at right becomes the tail fin of the fish. A second smaller fish, a mirror image of the stone's outline, is seen highlighted in blue.

-kbj

Keith Stamper finds at St. Peters, Missouri, include Levallois technology associated with human head profile sculpture

Keith Stamper's find of human head profile sculpture facing left, St. Peters, Missouri

A tool Keith found at the site in association with the human head sculpture, seen at left, is distinctly of Levallois technique typology.

Missouri human head profile sculpture, looking left

Ronda Eldridge flaked head profile looking right from Bee House, Texas, featured in an earlier posting. The Missouri and Texas sculptures are of similar morphology, with oval head and large nose, perhaps related to the same cultural tradition.

Rick Doninger of south west Indiana has identified Levallois technology in all reduction phases as an active industry. Iconographic art objects have also been identified by Rick as seen earlier on this blog.

-kbj

Theme of animals looking behind to birth from vulva, fertility interpretations by Dutch archaeologist Jan van Es

Dutch archaeologist Jan van Es markup of a face mask on a Licking County, Ohio, mammoth sculpture depicting the animal looking backward toward its vulva (click photos to expand and compare)

van Es writes, "Very interesting sculptures are the animal looking back or behind. They are looking to the open vulva for birth. Also the hunter or shaman from Lascaux. Rebirth with a bird item, bird head or mouth and a bird staff. Also the man has a erection.  Your mammoth sculpture has this item looking back to the vulva. Female animal of course:)

Recently I have from the Beegden, Netherlands, site this quartz sculpture, also an animal looking back." (click photos to expand and compare)

The Beegdan, Netherlands, quartz sculpture in turned position depicts a bird and egg, also symbol of fertility. I have more sculptures in this theme. It's a typological item in the old paleo."

Bird, eggs and a sparkling feature in a stone nest

-kbj

Large feline face identified by Buzzy Boles

Buzzy Boles find, Laurens County, South Carolina

Note from Buzzy: "Possible large feline face (15cm wide and 18 cm long) found in the same creek bed and close to the large black mammoth sculpture. One eye open, one eye closed."

Several large feline head sculptures have been identified on this blog and Buzzy's find is consistent with them and found in the context of other probable portable rock art sculptures, including this mammoth/Harlan's musk ox combination sculpture in subtle relief.

-kbj

A two-sided oolitic chert mammoth sculpture featuring a crystal eye

A crystal-eyed mammoth sculpture, facing right in this view

This sculpted chert boulder was found near other zoomorphic flints along the shore of the former glacial terminus swamp now known as Buckeye Lake, Ohio. The largest creature on the landscape was captured in simple, slightly disambiguated, figurative portable rock art sculpture forms being identified by several amateur archaeologists in the United States and seen on this blog. This sculpture invokes two "visages of the mammoth," one from each side. 

Close up of crystal inclusion serving as the mammoth's eye. The material the sculpture is made of is oolitic chert from Flint Ridge, Licking County, Ohio.

Side 2 view of sculpted chert mammoth in profile now looking left. The trunk of the mammoth is the left edge of the stone here. The sloping posterior of the mammoth profile is on the right, with its butt being the right vertical edge. The sculpture stands upright in this orientation on a perfectly flat base.

BBC artist's rendering of a frontal view of a mammoth

The fixed outcrop source of the stone material is about 10 miles from where the sculpture was found.

-kbj

150 years ago: "Common sense tells us that the primitive people who made haches and tools were able to make figures..."

Licking County, Ohio, bird figure stone

1) this object is an undisputable artifact

2) this object has a consensus (generally agreeable) likeness to a bird

3) this object combines skilled flint working with skilled artistic interpretation of the bird form

4) this object was found in the local context of pre-historic stone tools
5) this object was found in the local context of other flint bird likenesses

One may conclude this object is a figure stone.

"Common sense tells us that the primitive people who made haches and tools were able to make figures... ...As to the Symbols and Figures, although I have gathered of these some types which may be seen at my house to-day, numbering about fifty analogous shapes on which the human work is evident, I have converted very few people, and of the number, not one Englishman. Why-they say to me-are you the only one who finds Figure Stones ? Have they never been found anywhere else than at Abbeville ?-and-mention one collection besides your own in which they have been seen ...To-day, Sir, your examples will be questioned, I do not say that I shall have gained my cause, but Truth will have made one more step, and will strike forcibly by coming from two sides."

    - From a lettter from Jacques Boucher de Perthes to Victor Chatel, Oct 20th, 1866

Side 2 with scale. The bird figure has a serviceable and/or symbolic graver tool feature as the bird's beak. 

The thickness of the bird seen from above as it stands on its edge

Here is another flint and crystal bird figure with a graver tool as the bird's beak from Flint Ridge, Glenford, Ohio, featured in a post last October.

-kbj

"...certainly not a habit of nature"

Flint bird figure made of Vanport chert, Licking County, Ohio is one of several dozen identified by amateur archaeologist and portablerockart.com blogger Ken Johnston.

"Patterson (1983) warns that subjective discussion should be avoided and observes that even natural damage can be described in explicit terms. He places value on recognising the patterns that characterise artefactuality including frequency:

'Even if nature can produce lithic objects resembling simple man-made items, nature is not likely to do this often. Therefore, the frequency of occurrence at a given location of specimens with similar morphologies is important in demonstrating probable manufacturing patterns. Production of numerous lithic specimens with consistent morphology is certainly not a habit of nature.'" 

-Cultural cobbles or a load of cobblers? Identifying artefactuality and the detection of iconography, Richard Wilson, 2010.

Side 2 view

-kbj

Psychological "PAH triad" described by Bustamante et al. may have triggered the Stone Age artistic judgments which transformed mimetoliths into artifacts

Licking County, Ohio, sculpture find interpreted by Ken Johnston as, alternately, depending on switching one's visual attention, a lion head looking right and a one-eyed lion face looking straight-on

Flint and quartz crystals have been ground away around the natural crystal-lined tunnel which serves as the lions' eye. The eye may have been somewhat hidden before this action was undertaken by the artist. This same lithic removal activity was undertaken around the eyes and beak of the flint and crystal owl which was the subject of an earlier posting.

This is the bottom side of the artifact, a ventral flake surface

Optical illusion: in addition to the lion head looking right, there is a depiction of a one-eyed lion, a Paleolithic art motif described earlier on this blog. The one-eyed lion is looking at the viewer straight on. It is as if the lion looking right has turned its head toward the viewer and revealed itself as having only one eye. I have made a mark up of the photo adding a black oval as the lion's missing left eye in order to orient one to this second face. The nose, cheeks, mouth and chin area of this lion's face have been worked to clarify the desired end form of the artist. (click photos to expand and compare).

When mimetoliths inspire artistic activity, the large amounts of surface area which remain untouched, or are only lightly touched, often makes it difficult to notice or detect artifactuality.

One of my purposes for this blog is to elevate mimetoliths, or rocks that look like things, to equal status of artifacts when they are found in archaeological contexts. Also, statistically large numbers of mimetoliths in a concentrated area may also be used to identify archaeological sites.

The judgment to pick up and transport a stone object, or manuport, to one's location constitutes an action which we may conclude bestows the object with a kind of artifact status even though the object itself has not been modified. Its location and context has been modified to bring it into the human activity sphere. That is the business of Archaeology.

Bustamante et al. may explain why these judgments to collect, and often modify, mimetoliths were made by prehistoric peoples. Below they lay out the definitions for the "PAH triad" which they address in their paper "Search for meanings: from pleistocene art to the worship of the mountains in early China. Methodological tools for Mimesis.

"-Pareidolia (psychological phenomenon): involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Psychological phenomenon related to the Rorschach test.

-Apophenia (psychological phenomenon): that describe the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined by Klaus Conrad (1958).

-Hierophany (psychological phenomenon): the perception of a manifestation of the sacred.

-PAH Triad (psychological phenomenona): Pareidolia-Apophenia-Hierophany working simultaneously, is changeable among diverse individuals. The PAH triad is part of the unconscious mechanisms inherent to every human being, present in the primary stages of the early development of the human conscience." - Bustamante, et al., 2011.

Of importance in the taphonomic logic process, the archaeological interpreter and his audience are also subject to the PAH triad. The portable rock art interpreter is subject to criticism by his audience as "fanciful," while his audience seems to ignore the universally important role of such "fanciful" observations by our equally human predecessors.

Side 2 and bottom of artifact seen with scale

This is the second flint and quartz crystal lion's head sculpture from Licking County, Ohio, featured on this blog, and one of several large portable rock art lion heads.

Reconstruction of Panthera leo atrox, the extinct Pleistocene North American Lion, with a relatively elongated head like the lion depicted in the Licking County, Ohio, sculpture.

-kbj

Colorado head sculpture with muzzle-like nose falls into R. Dale Guthrie's illustrated gradient of large mammal combined with human features in Paleolithic art

Petrified wood artifact found by 29 year collector Chris Schram in Westminster, Colorado, near Big Dry Creek. It changes from horse head to human head as the figure stone is rotated.

"Many human faces in Paleolithic art look a little like those of large mammals, with an elongated nose or muzzle. These are my drawings to illustrate the character or flavor of this gradient"

(c) Copyright R. Dale Guthrie, "The Nature of Paleolithic Art," 2005, page 92

Orthodox Archaeology continues to overlook, ignore or deny the existence of Paleolithic figurative portable rock art in North America. Here, the art of the "mammoth-steppe biome" peoples of Europe and Asia as described by R. Dale Guthrie may be seen extending across Beringia to Colorado, USA. This possibility may be supported by the paper "The Mammoth Steppe Hypothesis: The Mid Wisconsin (OIS 3) Peopling of the Americas" by Steven R. Holen and Kathleen Holen to be presented later this year in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This polymorphic figure stone features images of the human/horse therianthropy described by Guthrie as originating in the psyche of the large mammal hunter, who "becomes his prey" in mind, spirit and movement, in order to be more effective. Change from horse to human through this transformational process is seen as the figure stone is viewed in left, center and right perspectives below.

View from left perspective: a simply beautiful horse head and neck figure

Chris Schram's figure stone in "center on view" with close up of a R. Dale Guthrie "center view" drawing which has been reversed here for a more direct comparison.

View from right side perspective is a human head figure. Gazing back leftward across the artifact from here, the observer sees the human head transform into the horse head.

Quite remarkably, this figure stone thus exemplifies Guthrie's "horse to human" art gradient by presenting horse imagery as one looks at it from the left and as one's viewing perspective moves toward the right, the imagery becomes more anthropomorphic.

Chris Schram interprets this sculpting work to expose the darker material along the back of the figure as representative of flowing hair, like a mane.

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-kbj