We visited artworks both Old and New during our final tour of the year.
Visit 4 Vocabulary:
prehistoric
/ prehistórico
ancestor / el
antepasado
symmetrical /
simétrico
history / la historia
contemporary
/ contemporáneo
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| 2nd grade |
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| 5th grade |
We first explored the prehistoric stone pieces in the First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone exhibition. First, students sketched a handaxe. Then, they became curators as they studied groups of objects and determined reasons why they were placed together. Our student curators decided some reasons they were grouped together were because of common shapes, sizes, and textures. Some of these objects were also symmetrical. Below is an example from each of the different groups.
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| Artist Unknown, "Big Boy" handaxe, Biddenham, England, ca. 300,000 years of age |
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| Artist Unknown, Handaxe, Niger, ca. 800,000-300,000 years of age |
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| Artist Unknown, Neanderthal figure stone, Fontmaure, France, ca. 150,000-50,000 years of age |
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Artist Unknown, Spheroid, North Africa, ca. 500,000-300,000 years of age (left)
Artist Unknown, Spheroid, North Africa, ca. 800,000-300,000 years of age (right) |
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| 2nd grade |
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| 2nd grade |
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| 2nd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 4th grade |
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| 4th grade |
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| 4th grade |
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| 5th grade |
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| 5th grade |
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| 5th grade |
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| 5th grade |
We learned a little about how our ancestors used handaxes and collected figure stones - stones that resemble a human, animal, or other recognizable shape. Looking at the figure stones below, students imagined that they lived hundreds of thousands of years ago and pointed to the figure stone that they would choose to collect.
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| 2nd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
We finished by looking at the oldest piece in the exhibition. The Makapansgat Pebble is circa 2.5 million years of age, and is the earliest known example of a human ancestor recognizing and collecting an object that strongly resembles a human face.
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| Makapansgat Pebble, Makapansgat, South Africa, ca. 2.5 million years of age |
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| 2nd grade |
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| 3rd grade |
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| 5th grade |
Beautiful photographs. Great! figure stones are getting the attention they require, pareidolia is a term that becomes meaningless when describing images in flint tools, as prehistoric peoples would of likely had the same mental ability, flint tools can contain many animal like images, view my webpage for the most stunning examples to be seen anywhere on the net. https://eoliths.blogspot.com/
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