Pointing, shaping and bending wood

Details of the rock art station 'Vente Bourbon 3' found by D. Caldwell around 2014 (published 2015) - one of many important and pristine new stations found recently in the forest of Fontainebleau by this team.

 

By searching on the words 'Fontainebleau' and 'Mesolithic' it is possible to find a significant number of results pointing to a date calibration for this rock art style and area of upwards of 11,000 years. After the work of D.Cadwell et al, arguments are appearing for a Bronze age date of four of five thousand years ago.

 

The newly found stations like 'Vente Bourbon 3' adhere to the general style of rock art from the Fontainebleau region, even if some other stations are of a larger line scale. Typically there are many straight lines, triangles, crosses and grids. The lines seem closer to the 'V' shape profile typical of metal tools rather than the 'U' shape of stone tools, but as the hardness of the sandstone is unknown to me, and as many authors seem happy that they were made by mesolithic flints, I keep this observation open - if weighted to metal.

 

There are several categories where crosses appear:

 

- Late neolithic and chalcolithic: often integrated with cups or merging with canals. www.flickr.com/photos/ajmitchell-prehistory/47491604471/i...

 

- Christian: styles include Maltese, St Andrews, Greek, St Jean...

 

- Alphabetical: x(yz...). A "glyph" that goes beyond a pictogram into pure abstraction, gaining meaning via conventions of juxtaposition. Monograms need to be watched for, but are of a one-off style and do stand out when multiple examples exist.

 

- Doodle: +xX. Perhaps more hypothetical and modern than anything else, as lines in stone take repetition, sweat, application, and an effort that goes beyond the spirit of doodling, and its formal manifest - ornamentation: perhaps more suited to wood or paint.

 

- Fakes: petroglyphic artefacts potentially redirecting prehistory e.g. Pedra de les Creus, Dolmen del Barranc d'Espolla.

www.flickr.com/photos/ajmitchell-prehistory/47522221221/i...

 

- Pollisoir: whilst nearly all sharpening stones tend to be straight and often cleanly parallel lines, crossed sharpening canals should be considered when looking at the specific Fontainebleau's art.

 

- Game: 'Pachisi' is a cross game, but more regularly found are variants of 'Nine Men's Morris'... here crossed lines tend to be in squares and over-worn, so there is little chance of confusion. www.flickr.com/photos/ajmitchell-prehistory/38488292972/i...

 

- Political variants: (Iron cross, Swastika). Individuals such as Pepito Meijón need to be factored for, but as a rule the problems tend to be from people who are obsessed with a modern symbol backdating meaning onto a distant homologue.

 

Other crosses exist in living history and although these do not figure when looking at rock art, they do show how one glyph can change meaning according to context and take the emotional and episodic mind of man into vastly different vistas. One is the cross at the end of a written letter - a row of kisses filling a child's letter, a family contact after a first name or a cross from a lover who is far away. A second is the cross that is the signature of an illiterate - a feature of cinema narrative, humiliation and irony by those who wish to withhold a name. A last cross is well known by both children and pirates and is the mark on a map that dreams of treasure. On each example, when the cross has landed into context the mind follows and fills with detail and the idea of dictionary precision is left wanting.

 

There are two crosses on the 'Vente Bourdon 3" station and both have one splayed stem. I have rotated the above captures to display both splays to the top (see the site photo below for the original disposition). Even if one is a little deeper, both crosses are similar, and it is perhaps the case that neither falls easily into one of the above categories, and I will argue for an additional category of "woodfolk cross".

 

One of the crosses is deeper cut than the other glyphs. Despite this, the depth of cut does not seem to result from repeated return visits from multiple users. Christian and neolithic crosses are often over-written on multiple occasions, each with a slightly different emphasis, resulting in a rounded but careful average. Here the edges are sharp and the envelope line is of similar measure to other glyphs. There are plenty of religious and political wedged crosses, but here there is just one wedge stem and no need for the wedge stem to be in a direction (up...).

 

The cross is situated in a scrub/forest zone with poor soils when compared with the alluvials to the north and south. A setting between large rivers fed with debit from the high precipitation zone around and within the Alpes (Loire, Seine). Both river banks have deep histories and prehistories of significant populations.

 

Other glyphs from this rock art station seem to suggest a pillared stage with steps surely made of logs and split wood. From this relatively convincing representation, it might be possible to isolate other glyphs of Maypoles and tent poles - all made of wood, and these are covered in associated posts and in the relevant Flickr album. A last glyph may represent a rectangular pit-fire with rows of overhanging logs. A lifestyle of tents rather than permanent crofts will have scattered the archaeological residues of lifestyle that may otherwise have helped with date ranges.

 

Communities of people specialising in the exploitation and transformation of timber materials will attract an extra regional public interested in taking away products ...'onto the back of mules in exchange for a pig', 'floating ready-made posts, bows and adapted wood-frame down a river in exchange for flour' and so on. Drawing 'clients' in, and even offering a seasonal 'woodland festival' for potential and real clients; for company and companionship, and in honour of spiritual and cultural traditions, may be the optic that is described by the rock art of 'Vente Bourbon 3'.

 

Woodland festivals would change place as the forestry camps move to new copse and glade. New paths to new camps might be signalled by arboroglyphs or marker (knots, feathers, teasels and so on). If the festival's date back to the bronze age or Celtic years then they might have been fully 'advertised' and overt, if they were during Roman occupation, then they may have been codified and suitably 'lost in the woods', and if from the dark ages, the actions would be in reflection of local feudal influence - transparent or codified. The cut off date is the 10th century.

 

Changing wood efficiently into forms that are appealing to man can be helped by fire and water (including frost and ice) in addition to blade, wedge, lever and oxen. Blades can be on axes, chisels and, with time, miniaturised onto saws. Fire can burn away roots, wedges can split the hardest oak, axes and oxen can fell and position trees and so on. Knowing how much to burn before removing a trunk, branch or pole from a fire: to then shape - knowing to have enough water, and how to stop the water from quickly evaporating. Understanding how to 'read' the capacity of a tree and even encourage the life of a forest - these are woodland skills that can surpass those of crofters, shepherds and new generations of village and even towns-folk.

 

Copses, woods and forests can seem to be everywhere - even after the famous deforestations of late prehistory, and travelling to exchange for a product that is made from timber would require there to be either a gain of time or quality, or a level of social specialisation that resulted in a significant skill divergence between atrophying and 'high craft'. Cutting down a tree, shaping a post pole into a point, bending poles adapted for stretched material coracle boats; key structures for wicker-and-daub frame work; sharpening wooden spears or hardening wooden levers (as Odysseus), preparing shepherds crooks, bows, baskets and more - all examples of woodcrafts that tend to turn to dust with the passage of time, to the point where elements with common points of origin may not be easily clarified by xylologues. Flint tools travelled great distance - might high quality processed wooden materials have travelled short distances?

 

Red hot ends to trunk and branch need to be seriously extinguished prior to chisel work as apparent mat grey so often wants to rekindle. Pools of water would heat, and the hot waters, and their associated steams, might in turn help to bend poles into new directions. A cross-shaped pit would allow several mutually beneficial activities to coexist. A wedge shape to one arm of a cross-shaped pool would offer options for intermediate bending angles over 90 degrees. A wedge shaped slope would also allow persons to enter the pool to adjust items.

 

Making a cross shaped pool would require a knowledge of pit-fires, and well managed pit-fires could quickly become monolithic pools. Wet clay keeps great heat inside a designated shape, and high heat differentials cause cracks in stone and thus bedrock. Days of red-hot embers 'burn' and crack stone to a point where cracks can be exploited with wooden levers, wedges, heavy pounders and other tools. Once a cross-pool is made, the increases of efficiency from the asset might assure a quality of product that is unavailable to new farmers and shepherds. Any cracks in the pools' ground-rock can be filled with a horse-hair cob to make the 'cistern' water-tight. Just such a pool in a woodland festival might become a feature for rural peoples from either side of the Celtic period; peoples known to be interested in the spiritual and 'Epicurean' qualities of water. A long pit-fire can heat large river-stones to high temperatures and these might be transferred to a cleaned 'woodfolk-cross' (a name that seems simple and apt) to provide warm water bathing aside seasonal feast, dance and rite. This detail might put the cross at the centre of seasonal woodland festivals, with the festival either side of Celtic traditions.

 

Iron age woodcrafts and early medieval woodcrafts may use a wide range of blades, and sharpening these smaller blades on sandstone during moments of storm or relaxation might produce some polissoir trenches - so visible within the Fontainebleau rock art stations. That some of these lines drifted into doodle and play needs to be considered for some stations or some elements. That other Fontainebleau stations were purely representational - albeit with high schematic line, would be proud and human.

 

The 10th century saw the forest enveloped by Royal jurisdiction. The impact of this change in definition on monolithic vestiges is unknown, but may have been systematic and destructive. These hypothetical woodfolk were probably not literate, but seem to have become aware of the scale of letters. They seem to have shared with other cultures a desire to find pictograms that concisely sum up key cultural elements, and linking some 'glyph' elements with research into pictograms and even the phase-change into runes seems valid.

 

In certain rural areas it can be argued that the iron age spread into the early centuries of medieval, and it might be from this optic that I would want to tentatively place the Fontainebleau rock art of woodland folk and craft.

 

AJM 05.04.20

 

 

Done