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.

06 December 2016

Standing bird sculpture from Hardin County, Tennessee

Jason Lamont find, Hardin County, Tennessee

This stone has been sculpted and stands upright on a flat base. The bird head up close seems to intentionally depict something roundish being held in the bird's beak.

Jason has suggested this piece may depict a 'bird emerging from its egg' and I think that is very possible. The bird is raptor-like with the curvature of the upper beak being quite pronounced.

Many figures in a motif of 'bird with head turned back' have been featured on this blog. They typically feature water birds like ducks with the head turned back and beak tucked to their back in a 'preening water bird' position.

This sculpture was found in a portable rock art context identified by Jason Lamont in Hardin County, Tennessee, and featured in other postings on this blog.

5 comments:

ADDecember 9, 2016 at 5:25 PM
Hi Ken and Jason...

That's one of the better pieces to show up on this blog in some time. It would be good to know its size and material (I'd guess limestone, could be wrong.) It does seem to be in the long-recognized theme of a bird with head turned back, apparently first spotted by Ursel Benekendorff a long time ago. (And occasionally other creatures are depicted in this posture.) Jason's hatchling interpretation seems plausible too, and who knows what people were actually thinking thousands of years ago?

It could well be that the object in the bird's beak is in the very old and common theme of one creature emerging from the mouth of another (see http://www.daysknob.com/Creature-From-Mouth.htm). A close look under magnification might be worthwhile.

Given that these figures were seldom naturalistically rendered, beyond a certain point it often seems useless to try identifying a particular species, something that can quickly put one in pareidolia mode. But while you're at it, you might consider the Carolina parakeet, now extinct but once abundant in Tennessee.

Regards, Alan Day
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UnknownJanuary 10, 2017 at 1:46 PM
Hey Alan ill get you those measurements when i make it home. I travel with work and am in Kansas at the moment. As far as the material im not sure but would be glad to send you some better pictures and maybe you could tell me. Sorry for the delay in my response you and Ken are a big help and i enjoy your blogs.
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Jonathan LohseJanuary 11, 2017 at 9:42 PM
I've found similar objects in the NH / VT area, which leads me to speculate that this style of rock carving was not only widespread / continental in scope, but may have functioned as a unit of exchange. The interpretation of a bird emerging from its shell is spot on in my opinion, and reveals a sophisticated approach to object-making indicative of a well-developed artistic tradition. The bird becomes a metaphor for the sculptor, who has liberated this figure from the rock; we are left to wonder not about the subject of the representation but rather the inherent incompleteness of art making, the impossibility to separate form from raw material. If we are to explore this discourse further, we may find that the culture responsible for these objects was very much like our own, and conceived of art in highly poetic, theoretical terms.
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UnknownFebruary 4, 2018 at 2:04 AM
They are nice. I live in Henry Co. Tennessee and have literally everywhere. From humans 1 inch tall 3/8 inch wide to a bird 3 foot tall 22 inches wide 4 inches thick and weighs close to 80 lbs. 100s of tools Flint scrapers and arrowheads. I bought property 3 yrs ago and have 9 fresh water springs. Maybe Henry county and Hardin county can get together sometime to look at some of them together? My cell 7312271061.Thank u
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UnknownFebruary 7, 2018 at 3:37 PM
Sounds like a plan. I sent you my number Via facebook
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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

06 December 2016

Standing bird sculpture from Hardin County, Tennessee

5 comments: