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.

08 May 2014

Southern Ohio cupule stone find confirms earlier interpretations of mammoth form symbolism in some of these artifacts

Anonymous mushroom hunter's Springtime find in Pike County, Ohio, is a "cupule stone" where the outline of the stone is an abstracted geometric representation of a mammoth facing left and a simple zoomorphic face profile is depicted on the mammoth's posterior facing in the opposite direction

Simply geometry of the silhouette of the mammoth reconstruction seen here may also be seen in the abstracted shape of the Pike County, Ohio, cupule stone

Manufacture of cupules has been ethnographically documented in Australia as a component of "increase rituals." If the North American cupule is related to the Australian tradition, this kind of sculpture may be seen as meaning something like "more mammoth please." If these hemispheric cupules are a result of antler billet tool dressing as Scot Stoneking has hypothesized, it may reflect the sacredness of the preparation of meta tools- or tools to make other tools, for a mammoth kill, including the flint knapping billet.

Two cupule stones from the Buckeye Lake area, Licking County, Ohio (left), and Perry County, Ohio (right), have been featured earlier on this blog as examples of mammoth iconography. The Pike County cupule stone featured here is especially like the example seen at above right in its representation of the mammoth silhouette.

A subtle facial profile of a possible feline looking right is highlighted by the markings on this photo. White is eye mark, black is nose mark and red is the mouth of the feline. These features are made by light modification to the stone by chipping and grinding but they are there in accordance with other described examples.

The presence of a zoomorphic face in this posterior of the mammoth position, even though crude and faint, helps confirm this known element of mammoth depiction motifs as seen in other portable rock art pieces. You may use this illustration to help identify this interpreted face on the unmarked photo at (top). The feline presence here on the mammoth posterior may reflect its position as a "helper" in creating access to mammoth as a food resource in the form of carrion.

Scot Stoneking of Massilon, Ohio, has written a book on the cupstone and has replicated through experimentation how many of them were likely created. An article he wrote on the subject was published in Ohio Archaeologist and is also available in .pdf format for download.

Adams County, Ohio, cupule stone exhibiting the mammoth profile form. This object has a flat base on which the sculpture would stand in the mammoth profile position. The base is visible in the lower right quadrant of the photo and is like the base which enables the Buckeye Lake, Perry County, mammoth cupule stone to stand upright.

There is archaeological precedence for cupules on zoomorphic forms. "Altar from house No. 45, Lepenski Vir Ib, Serbia, carved in the likeness of a fish, possibly a carp." -Don's Maps Maybe this stone expresses the idea "More fish please."

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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

08 May 2014

Southern Ohio cupule stone find confirms earlier interpretations of mammoth form symbolism in some of these artifacts

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