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.

21 July 2015

Mammoth, human and feline figures from the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont

Limestone mammoth or mastodon figure

Jeremy Lowcock find, Vermont

"I found these in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont. I was hunting for serpentine to make some hand made cabochon and I started noticing that some looked like faces and animals. It blew my mind what I was finding and for a while I thought it was just my imagination but I have found some crazy stones. Do you have any idea what this is all about? I have found what looks like an elephant or mastodon and I gotta say I am really dumbfounded. Any insight would be appreciated, this is keeping me up nights." - Jeremy

The Vermont location of Jeremy's surface survey finds suggests the people who made or collected this art were living along the retreating Laurentide ice sheet at the end of the last glacial maximum after around 13,500 years ago and presumably before the ca. 10,000 years ago extinction of the mammoths or mastodons depicted in the stone figures.

Mammoth likeness identified by Jeremy Lowcock

Standing mammoth likeness, side hole serves as 'eye,' hole in top of head may have had some purpose.

Vermont simple face 1

Vermont simple face 2

Vermont simple face 3

Pierre-figure found in 1939 by DR PRADEL at Fontmaure, France, (Mousterian site in the Acheulean tradition)

This gemstone serpentinite rock has a natural pattern which may have been noticed as a human face likeness in the Stone Age and collected with the other iconic stones found in the area

Detail of natural human face-like pattern which may have been noticed in prehistory, prompting collection and transport of the stone. Its high level of polish may indicate it was curated for some time.

Sculpture of 'Crouching feline, ready to pounce from above'

The highest visual point on the stone is the peak of the feline's arched back. There may be a depiction of the cat's left front paw. There also appears to be a nicely carved 'tail.'

'Crouching feline figure on a rock' faces viewers directly. The feline looks ready to pounce from above. This is a single stone where the crack delineates the animal from the rock it is 'standing on'. (Click photos to expand and toggle between marked and unmarked photos.)

Close up of the animal's face detail. The bifurcated chin helps tell us this is a feline.

Crude tools and a flake core identified by Jeremy Lowcock, Northeast Kingdom, Vermont, in the portable rock art context. The relationship of these kinds of tools to the art is suspected but must be confirmed by future archaeology work at multiple sites.

Willoughby Notch and Mt. Pisgah, Vermont

It seems the earliest Americans may have been using simple flake and bend-break tools to serve their needs. Similar simple points have been identified at the deepest levels of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina, with a 50,000 years BP date proposed.

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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

21 July 2015

Mammoth, human and feline figures from the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont

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