African Rock Art Research Articles

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in San Forager Theories of Disease, and Its Implications for Understanding Images of Conflict in Southern African Rock Art

San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly destructive aspects of the colonial project. Forging new societies from heterogeneous sources, they engaged in prolonged armed insurgency, recording their exploits, presence and beliefs in the rock-art archive of the Maloti-Drakensberg. These images reference conflict and trauma, conventionally interpreted as visions of spiritual warfare. However, viewed through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), deeper dimensions emerge. PTSD is the culturally subjective experience of generalizable neuropathologies which develop following a traumatic event. Diagnosable in diverse communities worldwide, it nonetheless requires insider idioms to understand its local expressions. We explore how PTSD manifested in this historic and cultural context; how its symptomatic social dysfunctions would have been understood in forager aetiology, and how its intrusive flashbacks would have intruded on altered-state experiences induced to heal the consequences of violence. We find that the artists were not passive victims of trauma, but rather used art symbolically to reconsolidate individual and collective understandings of traumatic events.

Revisiting the South African Unicorn: Rock Art, Natural History and Colonial Misunderstandings of Indigenous Realities

European ideas about unicorns spread across the world in the colonial era. In South Africa, hunts for that creature, and indigenous rock paintings of it, were commonplace. The aim was proof from ‘terra incognita’, often with the possibility of claiming a reward. There has, however, been little consideration of the independent, local creature onto which the unicorn was transposed. During cross-cultural engagements, foreign beliefs in the mythical unicorn and a desire for evidence of its natural history intermixed to an extraordinary degree with local beliefs in a one-horned animal. For over two centuries, colonists and researchers alike failed to realize that the local creature, by chance, resembled the European unicorn. A new synthesis of southern African ethnography, history and the writings of early travellers, missionaries and colonial politicians provides unambiguous evidence that one-horned creatures obtained in local beliefs before the arrival of colonists. Moreover, it shows that these creatures are depicted in South African rock art, and that they are a manifestation of San (Bushman) rain-animals. By ignoring relevant beliefs and images, previous scholars have failed to acknowledge that the South African unicorn was, apart from its four legs and single horn, a creature wholly different from the European one.

Anthropology and Inheritance

Previous articleNext article FreeAnthropology and Inheritance An Introduction to Supplement 25Laurence RalphLaurence Ralph Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI am excited to share with our readers a themed issue, Anthropology and Inheritance, which brings together significant theoretical concerns voiced by anthropologists across various subfields of the discipline. The anthropologists in this issue work with fragile and fragmented pieces of evidence to recreate imaginaries of past and future worlds as well as chosen communities. They illuminate ethnographic processes by which material “traces” become legible. Lingering on these traces allows them to explore how anthropologists mediate memory, construct frontiers of modernity and capitalism, and see and unsee the violence in their midst.The authors in this issue—each in their own way—complicate notions of inheritance. João Biehl does so through his excursion into the history of Brazilian migrations in the second half of the nineteenth century and the memory archives of subsequent generations. By exploring the Mucker movement, he details the German arrival in Brazil and the peasant culture they brought as a way to investigate broader ideas of affective worlds and world-making in anthropology.Adam T. Smith examines inheritance through his treatment of silences surrounding the Armenian genocide. He develops a Trouillot-inspired theory of “unseeing” as a means to interrogate how archaeological absences become powerful silences that bolster state-sponsored narratives. More generally, this article is a thoughtful call to consider scholarly and research practices and the precarity they introduce for colleagues working in totalitarian states.Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson investigate inheritances in their examination of southern African rock art by divulging mechanisms through which traditions mesh and creolize during cross-cultural contact. Their paper is a valuable exploration of how rock artists in southern Africa have historically highlighted certain aspects of the past while disrupting the socioeconomic conditions that threatened to displace them from traditional land. The article documents how rock artists portrayed processes of contact and colonization in a way that defies the enduring ideas of a “bounded” or “socially isolated” culture.Meanwhile, Aihwa Ong explores the inheritance of ideas about modernity and the future, encapsulated in her concept of “pastoral geopolitics.” Ong’s ethnography is situated in 2007, before the global financial crisis, when China and Russia were positioning themselves as allies to the West. During this period, the United States and England were embroiled in conflict in the Middle East and determined to turn Iraq into a democratic, parliamentary, multicultural, “free,” and privatized neocolony. To understand this moment of economic and political reckoning, Ong points to the failures of “universalisms,” thereby demonstrating the strength of anthropological critique.Finally, Tim Ingold critiques the notion of biological inheritance, noting that “knowledge … does not ‘descend’ from generation to generation but is regrown in each.” His article is a bold effort to meld ethnographic practice and social theory into the models and assumptions developed by evolutionary biologists. Taking issue with biological modeling in genotype-phenotype correlations, the continuity of culture and apprenticeship, and social learning, which often assume that cultural traits are either learned or not, Ingold advocates for more nuanced ways to understand the relationship between culture and biology. This is a critical intervention from which we all stand to benefit.Whether it is through moving autoethnographic description that weaves historical analysis with the personal, in-depth analyses of how archaeologists are trained to unsee, an exploration of an archaeological record that goes back 2,000 years, observation of “the civilizational imagination” at a contemporary economic forum, or an overarching analysis of the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, the articles featured in this issue represent anthropology at its best. They are beautifully written, surprising, deeply informative, and intellectually provocative. The editorial team at Current Anthropology hopes that you enjoy them as much as we do! Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 63, Number S25December 2022Anthropology and Inheritance Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722740 HistoryPublished online December 02, 2022 © 2022 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reservedPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Fluidities of personhood in the idioms of the Maloti-Drakensberg, past and present, and their use in incorporating contextual ethnographies in southern African rock art research

ABSTRACT In the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa, beliefs about snakes and their representations in rock art images are emblematic of hybrid histories of regional societies. The snake symbol initially represented an attempt at ‘reaching out’ as forager societies incorporated a prominent figure in the mythologies of incoming societies into their own – a figure which became a symbolic reference to cross-cultural symbiosis and admixture. Reflecting the long history of such contact, the ritual uses and ontological positions of snakes in contemporary knowledge systems of the Maloti-Drakensberg are coherent with those of earlier societies. This offers fertile ground for novel forms of interpretation. Using contextual historic and modern ethnographic material, this paper presents a relational account of regional idioms. It dwells on the language of taming and domestication that permeate these ethnographies, and the concern they show for the mitigation of ‘wild’, sometimes ‘monstrous’, consequences of spiritual power in the social world. Symbolic resolutions of these consequences are discernible in rock art images, particularly those of snakes, demonstrating the ritual brokerage of relations between human and non-human communities, with both forms of agency depicted in various states of ‘domestication’, bridging forager and farmer understandings of human–animal relations.

The White Lady painting in Namibia and its counterpart in Algeria (4000 ± 500 BC) (A comparative study in African rock art)

The White Lady painting in Namibia and its counterpart in Algeria (4000 ± 500 BC) (A comparative study in African rock art)

‘Everything has a history’

Differences between the myths, lore and rituals of southern African huntergatherers are often subordinated to supposed similarities. However, the lore of southern San groups and the ǀXam of the Northern Cape in particular, centre on ideas about water and rainmaking, rain creatures and an underwater realm. These ideas are notably absent from the lore of the Kalahari Juǀ'hoan in Botswana and Namibia. This has implications for analogies used to interpret the /xam testimonies and South African rock art, but also points to problems in understanding change in belief, lore and practices. These are especially prominent in a growing body of work on interactions between huntergatherers and farmers, as it pertains to understanding rock paintings and generating historical accounts thereof.

Therianthropes as human-animal relations: contextualising rock art in anthropological perspective

Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian “shamanism.” It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation of some images is not restricted to vanished “Bushmen” cultures but is present in contemporary “traditional” healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual practice. This paper abandons anachronistic “ethnic” boundaries of essentialised “Bushman” or “hunter-gatherer” cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, “nature” (animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set.

Rock, pigments, and weathering. A preliminary assessment of the challenges and potential of physical and biochemical studies on rock art from southern Ethiopia

Over the past decade, physical and chemical analyses have been widely applied to the study of rock art contexts, particularly to examine the composition of rock art paintings and for direct radiometric dating. Different sampling and analytical methods have been applied to rock art from different parts of the world. However, in Africa these analyses are still at an embryonic stage. The results are often problematic in terms of reliability, mainly as concerns the chronology. This is due to a wide range of fossil and active biodegradation processes affecting rock surfaces and pigments; such processes are still widely underestimated. This paper aims to discuss the state of the art of the physical and chemical analyses undertaken on African rock art contexts, and the urgent need to establish protocols and best practices for sampling and analysis. The preliminary results of a new project in southern Ethiopia are presented here as an example of an integrated study of a rock art context, combining Archaeology and Earth Sciences. Preliminary field observations and SEM-EDS analyses, run on samples from two rock shelters in the Borana area, reveal the presence of a complex set of physical, chemical, and biological weathering processes with manifold effects on the rock art evidence.

Indigenising the gun – rock art depictions of firearms in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACTRecent studies in southern African rock art demonstrate that we cannot take for granted that human figures holding guns in painted images are in fact depictions of Europeans. The acquisition of firearms by various ‘Bushmen’ groups in the Eastern Cape Province as well as their history of painting, makes it more than likely that in many cases the artists were really depicting themselves, not colonists. Yet one cannot claim that these artists viewed firearms in the same manner as the Europeans who initially introduced them. This is based on the well-attested practice that in colonial contexts the colonised often repurposed the material culture of the colonisers, thereby giving it new meaning in the process. As firearms became adopted by ‘Bushmen’ and entangled within their world view it is likely they were awarded spiritual attributes, making them worthy of inclusion in their sacred art.

An Interdisciplinary Investigation of African Rock Art Images to Learn about Science & Culture: Blending Biology, Geology, History & Ethics

Image analysis of African rock art creates a unique opportunity to engage in authentic explorations of science and culture using rock art images as data. African rock art and its context provide insights into the intersection of science, scientific research, research ethics, intellectual property, law, government, economy, indigenous people, and crime. This article specifically considers the rock art and other cultural contributions of the San people of Southern Africa, which offer a rich interdisciplinary exploration of biology—including the climate and weather of biomes, plant biology, human physiology, and more. An understanding of the nature of science, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is implicated.

Tusk and transformation in southern African San rock art: an iconographic analysis of WAR2

ABSTRACTResearchers have made significant progress in understanding the symbolism of certain animal images in southern African San rock art. What is less well understood is the combination of specific animal body parts to create composite creatures. Identifying the species from which a particular body part is taken allows for further insight and nuance in the current interpretation of San iconography. This paper explores this possibility in relation to images from the WAR2 site in the Drakensberg Mountains of southeastern South Africa. Numerous images at the site are illustrated with tusks. While the paper argues that the tusks at this site are modelled on only one species, the behavioural contexts of tusks are similar for all animals that have them in southern Africa. Linking these contexts and the natural properties of tusks to San ethnography allows for the elucidation of the imagery at WAR2.

From Plastic Sheets to Tablet PCs: A Digital Epigraphic Method for Recording Egyptian Rock Art and Inscriptions

Since 2010, the recording of rock art and inscription sites with Yale Egyptology concession areas in Upper Egypt has led to the development of new digital techniques. Those combine easily available technology with archaeological expertise to produce and collate publishable facsimiles within the fieldwork period, while remaining true to the conventions of the finest of earlier epigraphic publications. The ongoing threat to rock art sites and the recent ban of the Ministry of Antiquities on contact copies or direct tracings of petroglyphs brought urgency to effective and efficient means of documenting our archaeological sites. The nature of rock art itself, always unique and heterogeneous at the same time, does not allow technology to replace specialist knowledge: only an effective dialog between humans in the field and new technology has produced results both graphically attractive and practically useful. The present article will discuss the workflow we have developed, including the important role of tablet PCs in avoiding the potential distortion that intermediary copies may create (as well as multiple plastic sheets requiring re-alignment). Using an imaging-based recording technique called Structure from Motion, we are able to generate faithful and detailed three-dimensional models of the rock surface that are used to produce high-resolution ortho-rectified views (orthoimages) of each panel. Working on the orthoimages loaded into the tablet PC and tracing/collating in front of the original rock surface, the epigrapher can annotate, modify, or delete in real- time any information—both graphic and iconographic—pertaining to the petroglyphs. This facilitates the reading of the subject inscribed on the rock surface, even if irregular. It allows for a better control during the recording of inner and outer lines, especially for those areas that are damaged or weathered. Although our methodology was developed on Egyptian case studies, the series of tools and techniques involved are, in our opinion, much more broadly applicable to the wider panorama of African rock art and beyond.

From Central Asia to South Africa: In Search of Inspiration in Rock Art Studies

Abstract The paper describes the story of discovering South African rock art as an inspiration for research in completely different part of the globe, namely in Central Asia and Siberia. It refers to those aspect of African research which proved to importantly develop the understanding of rock art in Asia. Several aspects are addressed. First, it points to importance of rethinking of relationship between art, myth and ethnography, which in South Africa additionally resulted in reconsidering the ontology of rock images and the very idea of reading of rock art. From the latter viewpoint particularly inspiring appeared the idea of three-dimensionality of rock art ‘text’. The second issue of South African ‘origin,’ which notably inspired research all over the world, concerns a new theorizing of shamanism. The paper then discusses how and to what extent this new theory add to the research on the rock art in Siberia and Central Asia.

The vultures of Kalabasput: On the interpretation of a series of unusual Karoo rock engravings

A rock engraving site at Kalabasput in the Upper Karoo, South Africa, includes an unusual set of engravings featuring vultures. In relation to the ‘frequently depicted’ subject matter of South African rock art – such as eland and ostrich – images of vultures are rare. The site provides an opportunity for considering these unusual images relative to a background of “shared, transcending beliefs and values”, showing how they may have acted as metaphors for altered states of consciousness. But the paper points further to the possible ways in which the contingencies of particular places and histories may have influenced the production of unique or uncommon images. The art, it is suggested, was not merely the passive reflection of a cultural or rock art tradition but, given particular contexts, was part of its dynamic, on-going elaboration.

Revisiting the Parietal Art of Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa

Seen by all who visit Wonderwerk Cave, the rock paintings that adorn its walls have attracted less attention than many other aspects of the site. The paper gives a brief account of their history and significance and of factors that have constrained their study. Graffiti damage and restoration added layers through which researchers would need to delve in order to understand them archaeologically. Pointing to directions for future work, the paper concludes with discussion on a currently debated category of southern African rock art, the “non-entoptic” geometric rock art tradition, to which the Wonderwerk Cave rock paintings would belong. A shift in theoretical focus is advocated for comprehending local contingencies in the formation of rock art “traditions” rather than simply assuming the prior existence of such constructs.

Imaging the Layered Fabric Of Paints From Nomansland Rock Art (South Africa)

South African rock art provides a window into the Bushman worldview. For a better understanding of Bushman history and beliefs and the conservation of rock art sites, a better knowledge of the materials making up the paints, the mineral accretions and their alterations is required. A conjunction of imaging techniques (optical microscopy, SEM–EDX, Raman spectromicroscopy and synchrotron FT–IR) allowed us to describe the complex layered fabric that evidences a history of accretion, painting and alteration in eight samples of painted rock. Two types of paints are identified and the distribution of calcium oxalates is discussed in terms of conservation and dating potential.

Presenting Rock Art and Perceiving Identity in South Africa and Beyond

This paper addresses the presentation of rock art to the public, and perceptions of indigenous identity, by focusing on two rural South African rock art visitor centers. Both visitor centers were designed in the early 2000s to provide tangible benefits to people in rural areas and also to present rock art in a challenging and exciting new way – one that would dovetail with the central tenets of the “new South Africa”. Fifteen years on, this paper considers the extent to which the visitor centers have succeeded.

Digital image enhancement with DStretch®: Is complexity always necessary for efficiency?

DStretch®, plug-in for ImageJ© is designed specifically for the enhancement of digital images of pictographs. It is now widely used in the world since a decade but have thus far rarely been used in French and African rock art studies. Among all the software tools currently available to rock art specialists, it is one of the most efficient to decipher faint paintings and sometimes engravings, while being cheap, fast and easy to use, particularly in harsh or remote environments. Moreover, the enhancement of digital images with DStretch® is almost operator-independent and reproducible thanks to pre-recorded settings, thus improving objectivity. We provide several examples of the benefit of using this tool on various sites, from African prehistoric pictographs to Alpine paintings and petroglyphs, and propose a method for recording rock art panels with DStretch®. But, in spite of these advantages, we have to keep in mind that the final tracings are always subjective and biased by personal perceptions, as demonstrated here by a simple but significant experience.

Merging research, conservation and community engagement

Purpose – Archaeological, palaeontological and geological research has been conducted in Kenya for many years. These research efforts have resulted in exceptional depth of understanding of the region's cultural heritage including those with rock art. Unfortunately, very few of the research programmes have engaged communities as active participants in conservation and consumers of the research findings. The purpose of this paper is to report how collaboration between the National Museums of Kenya and the Trust of African Rock Art (TARA) is creating a link between research, conserving heritage and community engagement. Design/methodology/approach – An overview of two rock art tourism community projects undertaken by TARA will reveal that engaging communities and disseminating research findings does not only foster preservation of sites but is critical in transforming rock art sites into economic endeavours whose outcomes are providing alternative livelihoods. Findings – Community engagement remains the only viable way of ensuring long-term conservation of heritage sites going forward. Originality/value – TARA is the only organization conducting this kind of work in the African continent. This case study therefore, provides authentic information on local community involvement as a conservation strategy in the African context.

Can Rock Art in Africa Reduce Poverty?

The construction of physical barriers as protection of rock art against the threats of graffiti, vandalism, encroachment, deforestation, quarrying, and other human activity is rarely effective. The best barrier is a community which has an emotional or economic link to the heritage. Engaging local communities in the management, conservation, and valorization of sites and ensuring that they are beneficiaries of the heritage lays the foundations of those protective barriers. One of the ways the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) has been doing this is through the development of responsible rock art tourism. In 2008, TARA’s partnership in a project with the people of Mfangano Island, Kenya, led to the official opening of the Abasuba Community Peace Museum, the gateway to the Island’s rock art and other heritage. The project provided a community project model which TARA has subsequently used in Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda.