Archaeologica.org

Some new finds from yesterday for those interested in rock art .
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/sit ... anach.html

George

What is the average diameter of those holes, George?

Do they all have some sort of vertical and/or horizontal spacing?

Min , One of the biggest "cups " measured yesterday was 55x 20 mm average is 30 x 15 mm .
The spacings between cups vary and of course sometimes rings are featured too , rocks can be crowded with cups and you also get single cups .
George

Thanks, George.


Just looking at the way the stones are laying on the ground I would hypothesize ( French for "wild-ass guess" ) that these symbols had some meaning to the locals. Too much work to have no purpose at all.

Min , Similar markings are found in funerary cists and broadly similar are found in passage tombs implying a different level of import and audience to a simple marking on a prominent boulder . There is a reasonable assumption of one engraver , but superimposition , where one motif has been engraved upon another , and differential weathering suggest that in some cases the markings were not done by the same engraver . Each cup takes a modern HS about 15 minutes to carve so not necessarily a lot of work and the final outcome could also be cumulative .Not all the markings are that obvious and the audience would have been very limited , apart from those in enclosed spaces like tombs there are also sites that clearly would have required prior knowledge i.e. small bedrock surfaces that today are under turf and would have required curating /clearing in the past .Ethnography does have big problems when it comes to extrapolating from modern records to at least 5,000 years ago but there are examples of carvings being recorded for pleasure /fun . The same script is used for the most important cultural records and for pleasure and graffiti a broad spectrum from the profound to the banal , possibly rock art covered that same area .

George

Ah, I would not pretend to know what the meaning might be....just that it seems unlikely that someone was doodling in the modern sense and doing all that work.

Minimalist wrote:Ah, I would not pretend to know what the meaning might be....just that it seems unlikely that someone was doodling in the modern sense and doing all that work.

You would be surprised how many do claim to know what the " meaning " might be , and lets not forget that it could also be meaningless or polysemic .
I tend to agree that doodling is unlikely but as mentioned earlier there is ethnographic evidence for that practice but we can't extrapolate from that .

George