The Kendrick's Cave Decorated Horse Jaw () is one of the finest pieces of portable artwork dated to the end of the
last Ice Age or Late Glacial period that has been found in Britain.
[Decorated horse jaw.]
British Museum 2011. Retrieved 20 October 2011. Others in Britain include the
Robin Hood Cave Horse and the
Pin Hole Cave man. It is the oldest known piece of portable art from Wales.
When originally acquired by the British Museum in 1959, the jaw was dated to between 8,000 and 25,000 years old but
radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for Chronological dating, determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of carbon-14, radiocarbon, a radioactive Isotop ...
methods have enabled it to more accurately dated to the
Upper Palaeolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories ...
era, about 10,000 years ago.
[
The jaw was found by Thomas Kendrick, a lapidarist, in 1880 at Kendrick's Cave, Llandudno, Wales. It now forms part of the Christy Collection in the ]British Museum
The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...
, where it is normally on display in Room 2.
Features and imagery
The jaw consists of a 13.8 cm piece of bone, with three remaining incisor teeth.
The underside includes incised blocks of zig-zag decoration created using a flint tool, possibly with a fairly short cutting edge. The zig-zag or herringbone effect is formed by five panels of incised chevrons. Each panel differs from the other with respect to the number of lines deployed, its length and width. Some lines meet neatly at the apex of the incision – while others overlap. The artwork may have been enhanced with ochre in the Ice Age – but all traces have long since disappeared.[G. Sieveking 1971, 239] Either way, the incised lines create an effect whereby the areas between the incisions appear raised and dynamic.
See also
* Archaeology of Wales
*Prehistoric art
In the history of art, prehistoric art is all art produced in preliterate, Prehistory, prehistorical cultures beginning somewhere in very late geological history, and generally continuing until that culture either develops writing or other met ...
*Prehistoric Wales
Prehistoric Wales in terms of human settlements covers the period from about 230,000 years ago, the date attributed to the earliest human remains found in what is now Wales, to the year AD 48 when the Roman army began a military campaign agai ...
References
Further reading
*"The Kendrick's Cave Mandible" by G. de G. Sieveking in '' The British Museum Quarterly'', Vol. 35, No. 1/4 (Spring, 1971), pp. 230–250.
Also availabl
at
*Sieveking, Ann. ''A catalogue of Palaeolithic art in the British Museum.'' London: British Museum Publications, 1987.
External links
Front view and description of Kendrick's Cave.
{{Archaeology of Wales
Art of the Upper Paleolithic
Bone carvings
Prehistoric objects in the British Museum
Welsh artefacts