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.

30 December 2014

Petrified wood bird figures from the Big Dry Creek watershed at Westminster, Colorado

Identified as sculpted petrified wood bird figures by Chris Schram, Westminster, Colorado, in a context of other examples as featured on this blog and at Chris's site linked below.

From Big Dry Creek watershed, Westminster, Colorado, Chris Schram collection

Petrified palmwood bird figure, Chris Schram collection. More photos from the Chris Schram collection, Denver, Colorado area

2 comments:

Adam ArkfeldDecember 30, 2014 at 12:09 PM
Wow!
Outstanding. Beautiful sculptures.
Great find.
Trade you a limestone bird for a petrified bird any time.
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ADJanuary 3, 2015 at 12:22 AM
Hi Ken...

These are some excellent finds! Thanks for posting them. Looking at photos on Chris's own website, I see other apparent artifacts very much in the same form, very good from the standpoint of demonstrating replicability. Specifically, those you show explicitly display the very common theme of a bird with a distended belly. Of course it's often hard to tell from a photo, but I think the second piece you show may incorporate a simple downward face (eye/mouth) profile on the belly, consistent with the "Creature From Belly" motif that showed up quickly and consistently at 33GU218 back in 2003. Take a look at http://www.daysknob.com/Creature-From-Belly.htm, which shows just a few of many examples, including a Paleolithic piece from Italy. This theme seems to have covered a lot of territory over the millennia, apparently into relatively recent time in North America. (I should post more on this theme, but have had little time for the website lately, being preoccupied with the earthwork and, of course, with everyday chaos...)

Looking at the material Chris has posted on his own, I see a few flint projectile points, and am wondering if any of these have appeared in secure context with the birds. It's helpful, when possible, to associate the Figure Stones with temporally diagnostic artifact material. Identifying points is definitely not my forte, but after a quick search I'm thinking the ones Chris shows may be Middle to Late Archaic Period.

Happy new year!

Alan Day
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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

30 December 2014

Petrified wood bird figures from the Big Dry Creek watershed at Westminster, Colorado

2 comments: