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.

27 April 2017

Central Georgia landowner identifies an archaeological site with typical Paleolithic patterns of iconography and stone tools

Crude human or animal face on a cobble

The Kingpin Site, Central Georgia

Human head left profile sculpture on a plaque, with pointy head

'Eye' and 'mouth' work on the stone to sculpt a human face

Curated manuport or artifact triggers basic facial recognition reflexes

Human head with worked hair line looking to upper right. There is also work to create the eye and mouth features of the figure. Click photos to expand and toggle.

'Stone doll' from the Kingpin Site

Animal head facing left is interpreted here as a depiction of the head of the giant ground sloth. The animal's well-developed jaw for chewing is captured by the Ice Age artist. Only a few stone figures of the sloth have been featured on this blog and this is an extremely rare find.

The worked 'eye' and 'mouth' areas of the sloth depiction are highlighted

Giant ground sloth illustration for comparison

'Sloth slayer' from central Georgia

Giant point is among the tools found with the iconic pieces at The Kingpin Site. We just don't know if an object like this was ceremonial or intended to be functional. Was it used as a spear tip or maybe an earth hoe? It seems suitable for hafting.

Tools identified from the Kingpin Site in central Georgia

A well-utilized tool from the Kingpin site

12 April 2017

Lower Paleolithic human head profile in 'yell' motif from Île d'Oléron, France

Lower Paleolithic human head left profile in 'yell' motif from Île d'Oléron, France. Henri Valentie find.

Anthropomorphic stone figures with mouths agape have been variously interpreted as yelling, laughing, crying, singing, etc.

Mouth-like stone work treatment of the stone's natural opening

This natural formation may have inspired the artist to make the 'yelling head' motif out of this stone

Limestone lamp, Henri Valentie find

Hello
I present a limestone lamp of 15/12 cm.
The black burned part is 8.5 / 7 cm.
The second part is a geode. The hole is natural.on a human head profile.
The cavity of the mouth has been enlarged by the man. The opening is 4.5cm.
The piece is 15/11 cm
These 2 stones come from the same site (lower paleo) on the island of oleron
cordially
Henri

The Île d'Oléron is now just off the France west coast but would have been part of the mainland at times when sea levels were lower with water locked up in glacial ice.
Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1671703

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

27 April 2017

Central Georgia landowner identifies an archaeological site with typical Paleolithic patterns of iconography and stone tools

12 April 2017

Lower Paleolithic human head profile in 'yell' motif from Île d'Oléron, France