I
have been concerned
by the quality and authenticity
of many supposed portable rock art finds sprawled over the internet. Although analyzing and
describing these stones can be very difficult,
on the whole the stones should speak for themselves, and
any genuine piece should have glyph content all over it. In
some places
I have seen some obscure rocks that bare little
resemblance to there
descriptions and scribblings
over the photos, which only
adds more doubt to the stones
authenticity. (if
a picture needs to be drawn, the rock is
obviously deficient, and would not serve the supposed
intended purpose.)
Interpretations
of animals and hominids is another grey area, we can never be certain
of what we are looking at, even if it looks like a human, it
certainly does not mean it is, and nobody can ever prove it. Apart
from finding these things in sit tu,
our only clues about the date of these artifacts
is the species, and these can be hard to
interpret, most of all when dealing with humans, apes and hominins.
So again it is better to be vague in these areas
and let the images on the stones speak for themselves.
Continuity
in finds should also be of concern, finds should be comparable across
collections, materials should be the same, if not
similar, obvious working
marks should be present, important
subjects like elephants
should be repeated throughout the assemblage with
other repeatable glyphs present too, when dealing with them
as a collection, which
of coarse is the only way to shed any real light on them.
A
word on Religion, shamanism, and deep
space alien’s in old
paleolithic times, when on
the subject of portable rock art, these are just fantasies of the
mind and nobody has one shred of evidence to support these kinds of
claims, apart from a few not so old 'Venus
figurines' there is absolutely nothing to learn about religious or
shamanistic practices, so why even bother? There
is a little to learn about cultural traditions in the artifacts
themselves, but this will tell us very
little of the people themselves. What these
objects undoubtedly are is tools, communication tools more
specifically, which is hard to take on board at
first, until you consider that
at some point in our history people were
unable to verbally communicate with much meaning. If your suspected
portable rock art has no use in this way as a tool, then forget it,
its a rock and probably nothing more.
But on the
whole I would say that the majority of finds presented to myself
by collectors are most likely genuine artifacts,
and many people are furthering the study and do
know whats going on here,
Thanks in this department
go to Bruce Cox, Roger
Pascal, Dennis Moore, Ursel Beneckendorff
,
Keith
Stamper, Charles Belart and Athena Cumpton.
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