5,000-year-old Neolithic art found in Orkney dig

[theHandpuppet]

13. I think it's very cool that you're creating these carvings

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.