5,000-year-old Neolithic art found in Orkney dig
http://www.scotsman.com/news/scotland/top-stories/5-000-year-old-neolithic-art-found-in-orkney-dig-1-3026157(excerpt)
An intricately-inscribed stone was discovered by excited archaeologists at the Ness of Brodgar on Wednesday.
Nick Card, the excavation team director at the dig – which lies in the heart of Neolithic Orkney, between the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Strenness – said the latest find had created a “huge buzz” on the site.
The stone is unusual as it is artistically decorated on both sides and has impressive deep incisions.
Mr Card, of the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology and based at the University of the Highlands and Islands in the islands, said: “It is perhaps the finest piece of art we have recovered from the site, and one of the finest from the UK ever – amazing and awe-inspiring.”
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(I'd like to see more pics)
= new reply since forum marked as read
if you check "Ness of Brodgar."
I've been gaping at the images after reading your article. I knew nothing whatsoever about this.
Please take the time to look it up. You could end up reading from the images' links for ages. Very interesting.
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Thank you for your post.
Here's a sampling from a link at orkneyjar (click on thumbnails for larger images)
http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/dhl/scrapbook/st/index.html
This is my favorite:
That was from my stone art phase. I think I did it around the same time I erected Stonehenge. I did that one to impress a date 
- it didn't work. She said that I should have spent the time on my farm and hunting. 
She just didn't understand the art behind all those giant stones and the wood structure around them.
This is a more recent work:
Obviously, I write this in jest and hope that it makes some people at least smile. A small laugh would be good too. 
I did that one and a few others. I keep meaning to try doing some more. The stone is limestone that I picked up at a garden supply place. The guys there all looked at me funny since I was tapping each one with a hammer in order to pick the ones I wanted. (A good clean ring is a good indication that there aren't fractures that you can't see right away. A dull thud = fractures)
Here are two others that I have pictures of.
I have an MFA and though I've been trained in a number of disciplines, stone carving has almost become a lost art. So has the kind of printmaking that was my specialty in the old days, when you ground limestone blocks with grit and elbow grease and created prints one at a time with the use of a press. Cincinnati was once known as a major printing center but many of the special limestones used for this purpose are now gone and the remaining ones fetch very high prices. (It takes a rare type of limestone to make the finer prints and most of the blocks came from Europe. The supply has been dwindling for ages.) When the old method of printing gave way to a more mechanized system, the old stones were tossed. For a while people around Cincinnati cannibalized the old stones to create garden walls and such, only to find the beautiful limestone blocks weren't suitable for the outdoors. Within a few winters they learned that these fine grained slabs of limestone absorbed water and in the winter, shattered in freezing temperatures. That's why today there's so few usable stones left. In our ignorance we destroyed much of the remaining supply of limestone used for fine art printmaking. Well, enough prattling on about that.
One of my hobbies, which I pretty much abandoned after I left Ohio, was paleontology. It was an odd mix of study between art and geology, but it suited me fine. As I studied in Cincinnati, you can imagine it was a fossil collector's heaven. Lots of fossil-rich limestone and shale, as well as a particularly beautiful, fine blue shale across the river in Northern KY. You'd find that most of the limestone slabs available to you there would probably contain Ordovician fossils of some kind.
I grew up not far from the Great Serpent Mound, which probably sparked my interest in ancient cultures. The town in which I grew up is dotted with mounds of the Adena people. Among my remaining collection of fossils from that area are some very curious specimens I've never been able to identify, not for the fossils within but because of their composition, very heavy and iron-rich. I think they may be have come from an outlying outcropping of unusual geology in the area of the Serpent Mound crater. I've given away most of my collection of fossils but did hold on to a couple of these specimens, as I am determined to one day find out just what in the hell they are.
Enough of my blathering. Keep up your creative work! It's nice to see someone still practicing the traditional arts. After all, much or even most of what we know today about ancient cultures is thanks to people who worked in stone.
the human or the wolf. 
I'm glad people like the carvings. The positive feedback I've gotten is helping to push me to get some more done. 
was 40,000 people (biggest city in the world). They had already invented cuneiform writing, and the Bronze Age had started.
Artistically carved stones are nice - but they didn't get the Civilization ball rolling.
Sacred Eanna Precinct in Uruk. Sumer, Mesopotamia, 3000 BC.
I'd love to see a post (hint hint) explaining human migration--or even just a map illustrating it.
