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.

24 October 2015

Transylvania, Romania, figure stone invokes similar human nose artistic convention as seen earlier on a figure stone from Sri Lanka

Laura Ionescu find, mountains of Transylvania, Romania

Laura's find presented here is a single find outside of any known archaeological context. A stone like this is often very difficult to assess as a potential human artifact.

In this case, we are presented with an important clue which makes this isolated find a likely object of human attention in the Stone Age. There are two equal length incised lines which terminate at a point to create an upside-down "V" shape and it is placed in an anatomically correct position for a nose on the human face likeness on the stone. There also appears to be another incised line serving as a 'dimple' on the person's chin.

Hello Mr Ken Johnston. I am glad that stone that I have sent is of interest to you.This is the place where I found the stone: Turda Gorge (Cheile Turzii in Romanian) is a natural reserve (on Hășdate River) situated 6 km west of Turda and about 15 km south-east of Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, Romania.The Turda Gorges represent a complex geological, flora, fauna, archaeological area. Traces of human presence indicates Turzii in these caves since the Middle Paleolithic, Neolithic and culture belonging Cotofeni.Thanks. -Laura Ionescu

Illustration of the 'nose' on the Transylvania human head figure stone

Kavinda Dharmisiri's zoomorphic and anthropomorphic yellow sapphire stone, Colombo, Sri Lanka, featured in an earlier posting on this blog. The nose on the Sri Lanka figure is also made of two equal length incised lines terminating at a common point.

The find locations for the Romanian and Sri Lankan figure stones are about 4,200 miles apart. This may indicate a broad area of cultural influence which played a role in how humans marked stones to recognize or complete their human head likeness.

I have suspected the common artificial application of nose and nostril details on many figure stones seen on this blog may have been a way for Stone Age peoples to add a symbolic 'breath of life' to the rocks.

Romania and Sri Lanka figure stones with similar expression of human noses

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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

24 October 2015

Transylvania, Romania, figure stone invokes similar human nose artistic convention as seen earlier on a figure stone from Sri Lanka

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