![]() ![]() ![]() Photo 1A – Sculpted image below the petroglyph Yet today petroglyphs are mostly assumed to be only 2-D creations (width and height). The word comes from the Greek petros meaning "stone" and glyphein "to carve", which can also suggest “to shape, fashion and sculpt”. Petroglyphs were created by removing some of a rock’s surface by pecking, abrading, incising, and etching, and they are generally associated with large rock surfaces. Petroglyphs are common worldwide and found predominately on fixed boulders, large rocks, rock outcroppings, and cave walls. Petroglyphs are images carved onto stone. This article focuses on petroglyphic features as a means to appreciate, better understand, and to help validate PRA. There are many different aspects to PRA, including investigating the tools and techniques used, exploring artistic constructs, date determinations, and epigraphic studies (deciphering languages), along with historical and anthropological investigations. This estimate is partially based on fieldwork by the author at numerous locations, including retrieving artfacts from 12 feet (3.66 meters) below the surface at the base level of a working gravel mining operation. This author estimates that there are more human-crafted artfacts to be found than arrowheads-including those in collections. One might imagine that, like arrowheads, finding artfacts is rare. The sheer abundance of PRA is astounding. Artfacts, in comparison, range from slight additions on stones and tools to extensively art-laden embellishments that seem to have little functionality whatsoever. PRA has a wide range of groupings, including slight additions on stones and tools. Artfacts have mostly been ignored, in spite of evidence that they embody a long practiced ancient art implemented continuously over many thousands of years. PRA, also referred to as artfacts, are a classification of ancient rocks and stone creations consisting of lithic assemblages or technological characteristics - including worked representations of faces and animals onto rocks and stone tools. The author uses the terms PRA and artfacts interchangeably to distinguish them from traditionally understood artifacts. In addition to these unambiguous pre-modern artistic creations, there is an abundance of human-crafted rock art heretofore unseen and commonly referred to as portable rock art (PRA). Paleo rock art from around the world ranges in style, method, and age, and includes cave paintings, petroglyphs, pictographs, polished and engraved stones such as effigies, stone sculptures, and portable ceremonial objects.
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