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.

25 July 2015

North American Ice Age landscape sculpture: possible mammoth-feline combination rock art on a stone outcrop in Virginia may have European analogs

Possible Virginia Pleistocene landscape sculpture on a natural rock outcrop

Anonymous sent this photo of a rock outcrop in Virginia which may have been modified to further resemble a mammoth profile facing right. The mammoth's eye and the lines in the rock defining the trunk look to be areas which could be checked for human agency and inspected for dating by rock art experts.

Mammoth head and trunk

My own interpretation of this sculpted outcrop detects a faint feline face profile looking left on the posterior of the mammoth with remnants of an oval shaped eye and a two-nostril nose. The shape of the cat's head and a possible triangle-shaped fang tooth suggests it may represent a scimitar cat. This could be a recognition of the predator-prey relationship of these two animals.

Interpreted combination of feline and mammoth heads

At its peak the rock is about 20 feet (6m) off the ground. The Shenandoah and Appalachian Mountain ranges present endless opportunities for early American peoples to seek shelter and to reflect their lives in the permanence of the stone outcrop material around them.

With a strong bias in favor of petroglyphs over sculpture, archaeology seems to have completely missed rock art in the American southeast which was made by exploiting natural stone features like is done in portable rock art. This sculptural landscape rock art is also covered by this blog because it further develops the context for the portable materials and is related to it with differences only in scale.

Landscape sculpture find by Luigi Chiapparoli at Piacenza, Italy, interpreted here as a depiction of feline sitting atop a mammoth with the dome of the mammoth's head.

This rock outcrop on Sicily, Italy, is among others there which have iconic properties. A human form has been recognized in the right side of this rock. Maybe it should also be considered as a candidate for a rock art depiction of a mammoth or similar creature.

This one may also be considered a mammoth combination with a feline form where the cat shares the ear with the mammoth and is facing us with outstretched paws like a sphinx. The cat's head is turned and it is looking at the lower left of the frame, perhaps looking at the 'mammoth' moving across the landscape.

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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

25 July 2015

North American Ice Age landscape sculpture: possible mammoth-feline combination rock art on a stone outcrop in Virginia may have European analogs

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