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How is Rock Art aged?
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bladup
bladup
1986 posts

Re: How is Rock Art aged?Moving On
Dec 19, 2012, 21:41
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
bladup wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Sanctuary wrote:
tiompan wrote:



Granite would take longer but it is not used too often .It does tend have lots of natural cup like holes that could help as a start i.e. they that just get enhanced . Although granite on granite would work with nothing to enhance ,just take longer , the more complex motifs are usually avoided too .


Funnily enough that's a point (no pun intended!) I was going to raise, the use of a natural cup like hole to start it off. If they did and there was more than one, the 'pattern' produced would have been random and may not have been important to them, just the cupmarks themselves. Does that tell us anything other than the obvious?


No , it does us tell us something ,same as the important point that the rock surface often has a big input into what gets engraved . The assumption is often that the engraver approaches the canvas with a composition in their head that gets faithfully trasferred to the canvas .It doesn't seem that is what going on in many cases . It's more like jamming , you are constrained to an extent but not following anything prescriptive , you react to things as they appear to impose stuff .


Following the flow of energy in the rock or following and using "the fault lines" in the rock, see you do know.


As we don't know what the engraver imagined about the rock that is not visually obvious we can't comment . What we can see that obviously has an infuence on the engraver are the texture , slope , cracks and fissures and shape of the rock .


When I was at achnabreck a few years back (jumped the fence I'm afraid, simply couldn't resist) I was sat there dumbfounded, attempting to follow logical lines of thought to work out what it could have been that the people responsible were attempting to communicate, but I've come to think it is not an attempt at communication at all. If it were, why would not one individual throughout that entire time span have engraved a simple, naive, immediately recognisable image?
With what Tiompan has said above, and bladup to some extent, I wonder if the answer lies closer to the natural "characteristics" of the rock (or whatever properties the rock was thought to hold) being enhanced. The rock being manipulated for use in some way, rather than any type of communication.


the communicatuon could be with the rock .


I have to say that I do believe that some marked rocks were intended to seen by other than the engraver(s) . But it's only a belief .


Nether largie, perhaps?


I'm probably getting a bit abstract there! Do you mean seen by others as possible instruction?


The others could be spirits , gods etc in the case of the more inaccessible places like pasage graves or sealed cists . Or human in the case of the prominent boulder on an obvious through route .


You're making a lot of sense.
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