Incised designs most frequently featured curvilinear patterns, which could be easily adapted to represent stylized snakes or birds; the incisions were usually filled in with lime to make the design stand out.
Some, as at Sohano on Bougainville Island in the northern Solomons (c. 500 bc) and Yule Island off the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (c. 1000 2000 bp), have incised designs that may derive from Lapita.
A Northern Wei stele dated A.D. 529, and dedicated by its patron to her dead husband and surviving child, is far less glamorously executed than the introductory example, but lightly incised designs give its surface a kind of subliminal vivacity, as if clear water were constantly running across it.
The legs occasionally imitated those of animals with claw feet or hoofs, but usually they were either turned on the lathe and ornamented with moldings or cut from a flat slab of wood sharply silhouetted and decorated in various ways with incised designs or with volutes, rosettes, and other patterns in high relief.
Very frequently, personal anecdote and historical reflection interrupt the scientific narrative as Shelton puts the salmon in a human context, from the Pict who incised a design of a salmon on a monolith, to a Victorian ghillie.
The seals, dating back to the third millennium B.C., are wonders: thimble-size stones incised with designs that become legible only when the stone is rolled over wet clay or some other receptive material to create an impression.
Instead, he rediscovered the technique, which consists of incising a design into endwood (cross-cut section of wood with little or no perceptible grain) with a cutting tool called a burin.
Wood engraving, a printmaking technique in which a print is made from a design incised on the transverse section, or end, of a hardwood block.
"This is clearly an intentionally incised, abstract geometric design," argues anthropologist Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Some were painted, others were incised with intricate designs, and still others were barely distinguishable from pebbles.
North American Indian flutes may be incised with symbolic designs or decorated with feathers and carved fetishes.
