____________________          ____________________

Although the implements are sometimes bizarre in appearance, close inspection reveals genuine skill, creativity, and attention to detail in fabricating a functional tool from the material at hand.  It seems reasonable to assume that these tools were, when actually used, applied with considerable force over an extended period of time, and that sharp or rough edges against the hand or fingers would have been intolerable.  On this assumption, an object at this site is very seldom classified as a tool unless it meets these simple criteria:    It must fit firmly and comfortably in the right hand, or, if small, in the fingers.  When the object is held in a position in which there is such a fit, the bit edge or point must be in the appropriate orientation to perform its function.  It is remarkable that, with the exception of some of the more amorphous sandstone abraders, the tools present at this site both meet these require- ments and manage in most cases to recognizably if abstractly incorporate the ever-present bird or Bird-Human image.  It seems that cutting the image was an integral part of the manufacturing process, as much so as making the point or edge and the grasping surface.  It was seldom an intentional display of artistic virtuosity - just part of the routine, perhaps like forming the cross on hot cross buns.  Assuming an animistic belief system, maybe it was just putting the spirit's image on the rock it was believed to inhabit.  In any event, it seems that a rock was modified to incorporate both utility and symbology.

In contemplating whether a given lithic artifact is a "tool" or a piece of simple "art", a fair amount of confusion has arisen because the concept of art is, relatively speaking, a very recent one in the course of humans' physical, cognitive, and cultural evolution.  Seeing and judging what was left behind by people many thousands of years ago only through only the lens of one's own culturally conditioned perceptions will never lead to an understanding of what was really happening.  This author would propose that many of the puzzling worked stones (often called "portable rock art") that have been examined at this site and throughout much of the world, probably many of which no longer show clear evidence of use wear, are both "tools" and "art" or perhaps neither - just potentially if not always utilitarian objects that also routinely incorporate rudimentary iconography.  It has long been recognized, as in the Rift Valley in Africa, that early humans ("hominins") produced and left behind vastly more stone implements than were ever actually used, what would seem to be an almost compulsive behavior deriving from the fact that the manufacture of stone tools was a matter of everyday survival.  Perhaps an evolving animistic belief system (i.e., everything is inhabited by a spirit) and intellectual capacity for symbolic representation gave rise to the routine incorporation of simple imagery into potential tools.  (This seems to have been in full swing by at least 450,000 years ago, judging from some of the European finds from reasonably secure stratigraphic context.)

As was mentioned above, a few years ago this author noted consistent motifs and their subcomponents incorporated into artifacts from this site and others in Europe and Australia, and a distinct correspondence in modern but tradi- tional Inuit/Yupik carvings and masks, which also derive from something quite ancient and primal in a culture intimately connected to nature. In this context, consider this quote from anthropologist Edmund Carpenter's 1973 book "Eskimo Realities": "No word meaning 'art' occurs in Eskimo, nor does 'artist'; there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and dec- orative objects."  (Thanks to Richard Wilson of Watford, England for pointing out this book after being subjected to this author's ravings on the similarity of Inuit/Yupik iconography motifs to those of the European Paleolithic.)  It seems likely that the symbology persisted through many thousands of years of migration and ethnic/cultural diversification.  (Belief systems, like languages, are not bound to ethnicity.)

It is interesting and significant that just recently professional European archae- ologists have announced with great fanfare their realization that simple tools at Wilczyce and Lalinde/Gönnersdorf, showing no signs of use wear, are in the form of the long recognized "Venus" figurines that have appeared at various sites.  The fact of the matter is that amateur archaeologists, free of the long- standing preconceptions, have been recognizing and publishing this relation- ship for decades.  While the perceptiveness and insight of the professional archaeologists in this recent discovery certainly is to be commended, it seems that this announcement is, as is so often the case, a matter of assigning impor- tance to a given discovery less on the basis of its archaeological significance than on the academic credentials of the observers.  The presence of rudimen- tary "portable rock art" in the form of "tools" has long been rejected in Europe and elsewhere, this being "argumentation from absence"; no one (with a very few unpopular exceptions) in the professional/academic archaeological com- munity had reported it, so it was assumed not to exist. 

____________________          ____________________

The artifacts unearthed so far at Day's Knob have appeared mainly in these locations:

Most of the artifacts collected at this site have been cataloged or at least sorted by the location of their appearance, but a controlled dig remains to be com- pleted.   One 1x1 m square was started in 2003, with lithic objects logged by XYZ coordinates.  This was left on hold, mainly because of the large quan- tity of artifacts that suddenly appeared as the result of heavy rains eroding the deeply rutted "driveway" up the hill, requiring full-time attention.  Although barely started, this square has produced numerous clearly fabricated sand- stone objects, most of them bearing the ubiquitous bird/human image.