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ROCK ART AT RICE
Southern Africa is
sometimes referred to as one of the richest ‘storehouses’ of
prehistoric mural art in the world. For many decades the rock art of France
and Spain caught and held the world’s imagination. Now, thanks to
the research outlined above, and also to recent discoveries such as Storm
Shelter, the art of Africa is taking its place alongside sensational finds
of early human skeletons to form a crucial part of the heritage of all
humankind.
There are at least
15,000 known San rock art sites in South Africa alone; it is estimated
that there are at least as many again undiscovered. If one includes the
neighboring countries of Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia,
this figure rises to at least 50,000 sites. Unlike rock art sites in other
parts of the world, those in southern Africa are often largely as they
were when the artists left them. People who take the trouble to journey
through spectacular scenery to see them are seldom disappointed.
For the past twenty-three
years, it has been the task of the staff and students of the Rock Art
Research Institute (RARI) at
the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, to
discover, document and analyze the many thousands of stunning paintings
and engravings found throughout the sub-continent. RARI’s research
officers spend weeks trekking through deserts and negotiating mountain
passes—South Africa is a land of vastly different terrains and vegetation.
Rain snakes and
wildebeest
In 1999, a RARI field
team rediscovered a ‘lost’ painting allegedly depicting the
wreck of the Grosvenor, a famous ship which sank in 1782 with what people
believed to be a treasure of gold and diamonds near Port St John’s
on South Africa’s southern coast. Despite the efforts of hundreds
of diving expeditions, no treasure has been found, but the myth lives
on. In 1959, a famous South African artist thought that he had discovered
a painted representation of the Grosvenor in a rock shelter on a farm
100 miles inland of Port St John’s, high in the windswept Drakensberg
Mountains. A sensational newspaper report printed a black and white photograph
of the surrounding scenery, and also the artist’s sketch of what
he believed to be the ship. Great excitement followed, but the discovery
was then forgotten.
Over 40 years on,
using the photograph of the hills, a RARI field team consisting of two
research officers managed to relocate the site in a deep, remote valley.
What people in the 1950s thought to be a ship with “a mast with rigging,
bearing a tattered flag or sail” is actually a ‘mythical’
rain serpent—a creature connected with San shamans in trance. It
is flecked with white dots representing supernatural potency, and it has
a tusked, antelope-like head. Unfortunately (in the eyes of many) it seems
that another romantic myth has been laid to rest. Detailed study of San
beliefs over the last few decades, however, means that the old ‘gaze-and-guess’
approach to rock art can no longer be applied. Declaring that an image
is a ship because “it looks like one” is no longer acceptable.
Photo: J Hampson. Click to enlarge
Another exciting discovery
connected with the Grosvenor concerns the path of a Dutch expedition in
the 1790s to find the survivors of the shipwreck, some of whom had attempted
to walk back to Cape Town, nearly 1000 miles away! Using the expedition’s
journal and early, crude maps, RARI research officers pinpointed several
valleys through which the expedition was likely to have traveled. The
diary refers to a rock art site beside a “thorny river”, with
a rock painting of a soldier sporting a grenadier’s cap and several
‘realistic’ wildebeest (gnus). Badly scratched and weary, the
field team found the site, but unfortunately the image that may have been
a representation of military apparel (although ‘narratives’
in San art are rare) was no longer visible—another sad example of
the threat of weathering to rock art.
More photographs
from the Drakensberg Mountains can be seen
on page 1 of the South African Image Database.
Ostriches, snipe
and moths
Even more recently,
another huge site was found. A fascinating discovery 150 miles east of
Cape Town shows that, unlike the San art in the Drakensberg Mountains
where human: antelope combinations are the most common spiritual conflation,
the artists here based their visual metaphors on a species from a quite
different taxon—the ostrich. For insight into the meaning of the
newly discovered part-human, part-ostrich figures researchers scoured
the wide-ranging and plentiful San records concerning ostriches, and ostrich
behaviour. The unusually large, striding painted figures—some of
whom are over two feet in height—have richly striped legs and bellies,
and decorated faces; some have head ornaments. The ovoid white forms on
the back of a bag are, in all probability, ostrich eggs, often used by
the San as water carriers. There is little doubt that the stunning panel
is not merely narrative, but redolent with much less obvious complex meaning.
Birds are not common
in San rock art, but another awe-inspiring find in the great whaleback,
granite hills of the south-west revealed a painting of a yellow bird,
fringed by small red dots. The bird has been identified as the Ethiopian
snipe (Gallinago nigripennis). The outline in the painting—featuring
a flared tail and rounded wing—is the same as that seen when snipes
‘drum’, or dive at great speeds through the air. The ‘woer-woer’
call of ‘drumming’ snipe is similar to the sound produced by
bullroarers, which are also known as ‘woer-woers’. Flight is,
of course, a cross-cultural metaphor for altered states of consciousness.
Interestingly, another site nearby features shamans depicted as swallow-tailed
figures. Just as in North America, there is a strong link between shamans
and paintings of birds. The yellow bird in South Africa’s Western
Cape is probably a transformed shaman, too. The red dots surrounding it
strengthen this probability. Since the dots are depicted on and surrounding
the body, it is likely that they are representations of potency, or, at
the very least, representations of the tingling sensation experienced
during trance.
Photographs from
the Western Cape Province can be seen on
page 3 of the Image Database.
While paintings of
birds are rare, a painting of a moth in the east of South Africa is unique.
Ethnography informs us that moths were supernaturally—as well as
naturally—linked to game animals; the death of a moth in the fire
presaged the wounding of an animal out on the hunting ground. There are
also striking similarities between the three levels of the San cosmos
and the life cycle of the moth, and fascinating links between moths and
the San trickster god’s (/Kaggen’s ) protean nature.
A Zimbabwean enigma
Expeditions into Zimbabwe are always exciting. The massive, red granite domes in the south of the country abound with rock paintings of enigmatic depictions of ‘formlings’ and botanical motifs, images that are rare elsewhere in southern Africa. Formlings are oval- or oblong-shaped cores, often painted in a series, and placed vertically or horizontally inside bounding lines.
Redrawing of formlings by S Coleman. Click to enlarge
Early researchers
based their interpretations of these images on the narrative gaze-and-guess
approach, believing that San paintings were simple and direct depictions
of daily life and material phenomena. As a result, it was suggested that
formlings represented anything from clouds and xylophones to cultivated
fields and scenery such as hills, boulders and trees. Perhaps the most
widely accepted and well-known proposal was that the shapes represented
beehives or honeycombs.
Recent trips, however,
have revealed paintings that show convincingly that formlings are strongly
and symbolically linked with supernatural potency. Formlings are, in fact,
biological phenomena, and connected to insects important in San cosmology.
Trees painted alongside formlings form an important component of the supernatural
symbolism.
Hartebeest-humans
Returning to South
Africa, current RARI research in the arid Waterberg Mountains in the snake-ridden
north of the country (Limpopo Province) concentrates on an unusual and
recently discovered distinctive posture, dubbed the ‘Waterberg Posture’.
Researchers stumbled across this male human viewed in profile at the end
of a long day’s hiking through thorn-infested dry riverbeds. Only
one leg and one arm, short, and angled out and upwards, can be seen in
the paintings. The penis also protrudes upwards and outwards like the
arm. These human figures are often found in close association with stylized
hartebeest antelope images. The hartebeest, like the human figures, are
viewed in profile, with only one front and one back leg. The front leg
is shorter than the back leg. These ‘strange’ hartebeest form
a category of subtle therianthropes (part-human, part-animal figures);
they are Waterberg Posture figures that have taken on the potency of the
hartebeest—a seminal new find.
The Waterberg Mountains are also rich in the rock art of Khoekhoen herders and Bantu-speaking black farmers, two previously neglected rock art traditions.
