Stone carving
Overview
Rock (geology)
In geology, rock or stone is a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.The Earth's outer solid layer, the lithosphere, is made of rock. In general rocks are of three types, namely, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic...
are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material
Material
Material is anything made of matter, constituted of one or more substances. Wood, cement, hydrogen, air and water are all examples of materials. Sometimes the term "material" is used more narrowly to refer to substances or components with certain physical properties that are used as inputs to...
, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work.
Work carried out by paleolithic
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...
societies to create flint tools is more often referred to as knapping. Stone carving that is done to produce lettering is more often referred to as lettering.
Stone carving differs from stone as in marble quarrying in that it is the act of shaping or incising the stone, whereas quarrying is the activity of acquiring useful stone, usually in blocks, from geological sources.
The term stone carving is of particular significance to sculptors being a reference to a particular way of producing sculpture, as opposed to modelling
Model (physical)
A physical model is a smaller or larger physical copy of an object...
in clay or casting.
