A matter of diversity? Identifying past hunter-gatherer aggregation camps through data driven analyses of rock art sites

Abstract

During the last decades, ethnographic observations taught hunter-gatherer archaeologists to incorporate social phenomena into their interpretative models of land uses, including rock art. Although ethnographic analogies always allow only a rough approximation to the past, strategies such as the (seasonal) aggregation and dispersion of San groups, and related exchange systems, have become an integral part of the interpretation of variability in the spatial organisation of sites and the excavated material culture. Regardless of a long-standing dispute about its potential meaning, one widely accepted explanation for making rock art is that it was part of the social contexts of past hunter-gatherer aggregation events. While motifs such as the jointly performed trance dance seem to support this view, methods to identify aggregation and dispersion events within rock art on a larger scale are poorly developed. The objective of this paper is to better understand the organisation of the rock art sites at the Dâureb in Namibia using GIS and computational archaeology in the light of hunter-gatherer aggregation and dispersion strategies.