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.

04 September 2013

Carved petrified wood human head profile is second such example identified by Chris Schram from the same Colorado valley

Chris Schram find, Westminster Colorado, near Big Dry Creek

Human head profile looking left, mid-facial prominence and recessive chin like archaic-type humans or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. This is the second human profile on petrified wood identified by Chris, the first one featured in an earlier posting on this blog.

-kbj

3 comments:

Alan DaySeptember 11, 2013 at 12:58 AM
Hi Ken...

That's a very nice piece! Here in southeastern Ohio artifacts of petrified wood appear from time to time, although not very often, from what I have read. So far they seem to show up in contexts ranging in age from Late Archaic through Late Prehistoric. A friend and I have found two pieces of this material (not iconographic, far as I can see) at a site in eastern Muskingum County, in context with excellent limestone Figure Stones / tools and nonlocal Upper Mercer flint debitage. My quite tentative guess at this point is that this material likely dates from the Archaic Period, and that the petrified wood fragments are manuports collected for their novelty.

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AnonymousOctober 3, 2013 at 10:12 PM
I live in Greeley Colorado North of Chris, 51 years old, have been putting petrified rocks in my pockets (and messing up the women's washers since I was 2 here in Colo. I have had and lost several collections (no want of my own). The collection I have now is in the 1000's of pieces mostley petrified ( I would argue some-at least- are not wood) and it grows by the day. I've submitted pics to this site, none have been posted. However on almost ALL my specimens (most from 3 specific sites, and ranging in size from 1/2 inch to 14 inch), I repeat almost ALL there are multiple images. Not just 1 or 2, dozens. I lost count on 1 over 300. Look closer at Chris', I count 5 profiles looking to the left. the beard area of the big one is the next easiest to see and it has POINTED EARS! I dare say if any of you have found an image or 2 on a collected piece, take another look. And bear in mind that these people probably drew from a much larger species base than we, and they might have enjoyed comedy. I swear some of my pieces look like cartoons. I have pictures on Facebook, if it's Ok with this site find me under Gregg Lee Greeley, Colo. Happy Hunting
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AnonymousOctober 18, 2013 at 3:02 PM
I found the piece I have that looks like this one. I'll get you some pics. It's mind blowing!
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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.

Denisovan Ancestry in East Eurasian and Native American Populations

04 September 2013

Carved petrified wood human head profile is second such example identified by Chris Schram from the same Colorado valley

3 comments: