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tiompan

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Re: Slaggyford Stones .

Sep 10, 2011, 19:27

Littlestone wrote:

There is no way that Silbury could have looked much different due to soil mechanics . From our perspective no matter how impressive , it's the fact that it was man made that is most important .

That is not quite true – it could have looked very different but, as you rightly point out, soil mechanics (perhaps more accurately geotechnical mechanics here as Silbury is not strictly made of soil) would have dictated the shape (if it were indeed just a mound of heaped up material). But Silbury is not a mound of heaped up material - it is, actually, a very sophisticated structure, and could have looked like anything the builders wanted it to look like. It would certainly have had a tiered aspect when the final stage was first completed.

But sorry, that’s all beside the point; the point being that art (rockart or otherwise) is a construct of the human mind not the human hand – simply taking hammer and chisel to a material is not the only way to elevate something to the status of art.

It might have looked different if they had exclusively used stone or chalk blocks .

That is harking back to the problem about the term , rock art , who is to say it is art , certainly all of us who bandy the term about don't really mean it is to be the same as the rennaissance definition . Art as a modern concept is unlikely to have been one used in the period when it was being engraved . people have been suggesting other more approprite terms should be used but it's too late . No matter how aesthetically pleasing it may be to us moderns it is probably better not to think of it as "art " .

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Re: Slaggyford Stones . (Littlestone)

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