Ron Geitgey       P H O T O G R A P H E R    —    S T O N E   S C U L P T O R Home     Background     Sculpture Gallery     Photo Gallery     Private Photo Sessions     Stone Queries     Merchandise     Contact S T O N E  Q U E R I E S         Contents       1       2       3       4       5       6       7       8       9       10       11       12   Stone Query 9 –  STONE NAMES   Ron Geitgey www.rongeitgey.com   Why are there so many different names for stone? Which ones do I have to know?   The quick and flippant answer is: Because there are so many different kinds of stone. While accurate, it's not particularly helpful and it's only part of the answer. The other part is that there are so many different uses for stone and different ways of looking at it.   We sort, classify, categorize, and name everything (and everyone) we encounter. It's our way of fitting new things into our existing framework of familiar things. The stonemason sees a "boulder"; the stone sculptor sees a "granite"; the stone dealer sees "Peekskill Pewter"; and the geologist sees a "quartz-bearing hornblende norite"; and all four are looking at the same rock. The stonemason's concern is that the rock is unlike other local stone. Its hardness and rounded shape will require different working techniques but it will present an interesting appearance in a finished wall. The sculptor notes a stone with pleasing color variations. It isn't sandstone, it's too coarse-grained and too hard to be marble, and it's going to require carbide and diamond tools to execute the intended design. The stone dealer has an eye-catching, marketable name for a gray stone, a name evoking the Revolutionary War history of the nearby town in the Hudson River Valley and perhaps even hinting of echoing hoofbeats of silversmith Paul Revere (or at least his horse's hoofbeats). The geologist recognizes an intrusive igneous rock of unusual mineralogy which on the one hand grades into a commercial emery deposit and on the other may shed light on the geologic development of the core of an ancient mountain chain.   So which name is correct? That depends on who's speaking and who's listening. Within their respective area of interest none of the names each has used is wrong. The name communicates the necessary information to the appropriate specialist. However, cross between specialties and the name may be meaningless at best and completely misleading at worst. Peekskill Pewter would mean little to anyone not familiar with the stone fabrication business. Granite would convey some idea of hardness and workability to fellow sculptors but used as above the term would baffle a geologist, to whom granite means a rock with a very specific range of mineralogical and chemical composition. Norite has its own characteristics and mode of origin and they are not same as those of granite (in the geological sense).   The U.S. Department of Commerce uses only four names in reporting statistics on stone: granite, marble, travertine, and other stone. The stone fabrication and sales industry uses hundreds of names, all as marketing tools of individual companies' own invention and most of which convey little or no information about the stone's character. Geologists have their own huge collection of names based on often subtle composition variations, and governed by international committees so that a given name means the same to geologists around the world. But a very large number of those names are useless to the nongeologist looking at a rock in his hand because they cannot be accurately applied without detailed laboratory analysis. Even the geologist pronouncing a freshly whacked off fine-grained black rock to be a basalt may in fact really be saying it looks a lot like other fine-grained black rocks that laboratory work has shown to be basalt, rather than andesite, or andesitic basalt, or basaltic andesite, or .....   A well-rounded stone sculptor, or observer of stone sculpture, should become familiar with perhaps a dozen or more stone types and develop an appreciation of the complexity and ambiguity of the many names for those stones, but my tolerance for the arcane may be higher than yours. I suppose a sculptor could, for example, carve Yule marble all of his life and never need any other name.   But don't assume you know a stone's carving characteristics just because you know its name - whose name is it? Use your knife or steel point to test it before you haul it home.   Sculpture Northwest, March/April 2003 published by Northwest Stone Sculptors Association (NWSSA)   BACK TO TOP   Photos by Ron Geitgey  |  Website design by Anne Rutherford  |  © Ron Geitgey, 2009  All Rights Reserved.