Mongolian Deer Stones in Smithsonian Magazine

Submitted by Anonymous on Saturday, 07 December 2002 Page Views: 7817

Two Mongolian children, wearing traditional felt tunics and riding shaggy ponies, showed up on the scientists’ second day of fieldwork. "They wanted to know one thing," recalls William Fitzhugh. ‘Why are you painting our stones blue?’"

This past summer, Fitzhugh, 59, who is chairman of anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and his team convened at Ushkin Uver, an archaeological site in a broad, short-grass valley rimmed by the mountains of north-central Mongolia. (Ushkin Uver translates as Lung Mountain, referring to a perception that the peaks in the distance resemble, in form and color, a sheep’s lung—mutton being a dietary staple in these parts.) There, a squared-off, gray granite column rises eight feet out of the sandy soil of the steppe. The stone monolith, 2,500 to 3,000 years old, is inscribed with ancient images of deerlike creatures as well as a series of circles. The top of the shaft bears a mysteriously playful rendering of a human face, its mouth puckered in an artfully rounded O. The pillar is known to scholars as a deer stone, one of about 600 similarly ornamented Bronze Age monoliths representing strange, hybrid hoofed mammals possessed of antlers and duck-bill-like snouts. The ornately embellished monuments, erected by unknown peoples, lie scattered across northern Mongolia and southern Siberia.

But why were scientists painting this one blue?

Fitzhugh explained to the youngsters that the Ushkin Uver specimen is the only deer stone bearing a human likeness. In order to preserve an image of the artifact, which is deteriorating under exposure to the elements, Fitzhugh’s team got permission from the Mongolian government to make a museum-grade cast. The blue "paint," Fitzhugh says, was actually liquid latex that would dry to create a rubbery reverse impression of the stone. The latex would pick up every feature, down to the tiniest nick, in the ancient rock. When dry, it would be peeled off and taken to the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C., where a cast could be made and displayed. Fitzhugh assured his audience that the undamaged stone, which the Mongolians regard as the talisman of an ancient heritage, would remain in place. And stay gray.

More: Smithsonian Magazine.

Note: Deer me, they obviously don't know about Alligator's Archaeoptics non-invasive laser scanning!

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