Esther Jacobsen and the Altai. Insights into Neolithic Art.

Brilliant to see Esther Jacobson again...she has created two UNESCO sites in Mongolia, in the NW region where she has been working, marking  archaic rock sites and ritual sites...and came in second place for geographic mapping, next to the National Geographic Society...for the year's award. She has two new books out, the one on the cultural aspects of the rock sites and complexes.  She showed how an early style the artisan used a rock and struck out a crude figure, directly impressed by the experience of a particular animal.  Then she showed how in the Bronze Age the lines became definite, vivid, and it is thought the artist had access to a tool which he pushed with a rock. She remarks that she found, she thinks, the same hand in two different locations, in the same time period. 

I ask her the question:  how did the people "interact" with the rocks, the visual form.  I reiterate that it was an oral tradition, since there was not a written text.  I am pleased to see Patricia Berger pick this up...

My memory is jogged, and I recall that I retrieved a manuscript in Korean on the Lake Bakail area which addresses rock art, and textiles, etc...for Emma Bunker, which she had wanted...when I was in Irkutsk.  She knows the studies and says I can find it in Korean in the North Asian Institute here at Berkeley.

Esther is staying at the Berkeley City Club.   Patricia tells her about someone who lives there, who had all her antiques shipped from Shanghai, etc...and so on.  

I wonder where my deer stone pictures are.  She showed pictures of elk, of mammoths, of ostrich, of ibex, of sheep, and even of rhinocerous, today, illustrating the different periods in which these species thrived and then moved on. Due to the climatic zone. The geological shifts.   May very well be the case in California!