Southern Africa has been called the richest storehouse of rock art in the world. Certainly, the number of sites with rock paintings (pictographs) and rock engravings (petroglyphs) run into untold thousands. Rock paintings are found, principally, in the open rock shelters of the mountainous regions skirting the high central plateau. On the plateau, where there are far fewer rock shelters, there are comparatively few rock paintings but large numbers of rock engravings. Rock engravings are hammered, incised, or scraped into rocks and boulders on the tops of low rises or, in some instances, into flat glacial pavements exposed in riverbeds.
Apart from geographical location and technique of manufacture, there are other differences between the two art forms. Generally speaking, among the paintings, depictions of human beings outnumber those of animals; geometric motifs are rare. Human and animal images are often arranged in what appear to be scenes. In contrast, there are very few rock engravings depicting human beings; animal depictions far outnumber them. Moreover, there is a high percentage of geometric motifs among the rock engravings; some sites comprise almost entirely geometrics. Finally, there are very few engraved scenes.
The dating of these rock paintings and engravings has, as in other parts of the world, proved difficult. The oldest date so far obtained for rock paintings comes from southern Namibia, where six portable pieces of stone with paintings were found in an excavated stratum that was dated by radiocarbon to approximately 27,000 B.P. At the other end of the time scale, the most recent art was made at the end of the nineteenth century and perhaps in the first decade of the twentieth century. Various paintings and engravings have been dated to periods between these two extremes. Certainly as far as the rock paintings are concerned, most of those done in the sandstone rock shelters of the southeastern mountains, one of the most densely painted areas, cannot be more than, say, 800 years old. Their deterioration over even a few decades has been noticeable.
The comparatively recent date implied by the deterioration of the paintings suggests that the beliefs and cosmology of the various San (also known as Bushmen) groups will provide a clue to the meaning of the art. By far the majority of the paintings and engravings were made by San hunter-gatherers. Black Bantu-speaking farmers made some clearly different rock art, but some of them probably understood much about San art. The San who made rock art no longer exist as functioning communities, and the groups that survive in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia and Botswana have no tradition of rock art. However, thanks chiefly to the work of Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875) and Lucy Lloyd (1834–1914), we know that the southern people who made much of the art had beliefs and rituals very similar to those still surviving among the Kalahari people.
For many decades these records of San beliefs were ignored, and researchers tended to guess what the art meant. Art for art's sake, sympathetic hunting magic, and the chronicling of events were all suggested as possible explanations. Since the late 1970s, when researchers began to study San beliefs, there has been a move away from these explanations and toward acceptance of the religious content and function of both the engravings and the paintings.
San religion is essentially shamanistic. San shamans, who many number as many as half the men and a third of the women in a camp, enter trance at large, communal curing, or "medicine," dances. The shamans of the southern groups were believed to perform various tasks while they were in trance. Some shamans made rain, others cured the sick, while still others guided antelope into the waiting hunters' ambush. A few shamans were believed to shoot "arrows of sickness" into people.
To enter trance, San shamans activated a supernatural potency that was believed to reside in various things, especially in the eland, the largest African antelope and, in many areas, the most frequently painted or engraved animal. The eland was also associated with girls' puberty rituals, boys' first-kill observances, and marriage rites. Depictions of eland thus probably had many associations, though their principal association was shamanistic potency. Other kinds of depictions represent shamanic rituals and hallucinations. Some of the images of visions show shamans partially transformed into animals. The art was thus principally though not exclusively, associated with the spirit world.
When, toward the end of the nineteenth century, colonial expansion began to destroy the San way of life, traditional beliefs and art helped them to cope with the new threat. Paintings of farmers with horses, rifles, and wagons are sometimes accompanied by shamanic elements. In the face of the rifles, the traditional shaman defenses against evil were impotent and the San communities were destroyed and the art came to an end.
J. David Lewis-Williams
Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland (1976).
J. David Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing (1981).
J. David Lewis-Williams and Thomas A. Dowson, Images of Power (1989).
Harald Pager, Rock Paintings of the Upper Brandberg (1989).
Thomas A. Dowson, Rock Engravings of Southern Africa (1992).
From The Oxford Companion to Archaeology
