San Rock Art

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery. Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.

Richly illustrated in colour and black and white, this guide provides a clear understanding of a cultural treasure.

Goes to the heart of contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern" minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic conclusions about the nature of ancient societies. How did ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.

The cornerstone of current understanding of rock art of the San of Drakensberg First published in 1976, People of the Eland was the first major step away from the outsider's view upon San rock art that had dominated studies of rock art for nearly a century. The book, an account of the rock art of the San of the Drakensberg Range, was also about the mountain San themselves: their lives, their beliefs, their culture and their history during colonisation. The book not only brought an extraordinary and dynamic body of art to the attention of a global audience, but also helped to lay the foundations for a new generation of research into the meaning of prehistoric art. People of the Eland aimed to gain an insider's view of the rock art using San understandings of the world. While following this approach, it quickly became clear to Vinnicombe that the art was very far from simple depictions of daily life as had once seemed likely, but instead reflected the most deeply held San beliefs and symbols. This approach and this understanding has now become the standard for all those working with San rock art. Whilst this early knowledge of San art has been built upon considerably since 1976, People of the Eland remains a cornerstone of our current understanding. Reprinted here in full color, with the original artwork and photographs, People of the Eland remains a seminal work, the impact of which cannot be underestimated.

Cutting edge contributions that consider new approaches to the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. This volume contains contributions that consider new approaches to three areas: the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. Working with Rock Art is the first edited volume to consider each of these areas in a theoretical rather than a technical fashion, and it therefore makes a significant contribution to the discipline. The volume aims to promote the sharing of new experiences between leading researchers in the field. While the geographic focus is truly global, there is a dominant north-south axis with strong representation from researchers in southern Africa and northern Europe, two leading centres for new approaches in rock art research. Working with Rock Art opens up a long overdue dialogue about shared experiences between these two centres, and a number of the chapters are the first published results of new collaborative research. Since this volume covers the recording, interpretation and presentation of rock art, it will attract a wide audience of researchers, heritage managers and students, as well as anyone interested in the field of rock art studies.

This book explores a suite of spatially close San (Bushmen) rock painting sites in the Maclear District of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. As a suite, the sites are remarkable because, despite their proximity to each other, they share patterns of similarity and simultaneous difference.

The purpose of Seeing and Knowing is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of David Lewis-Williams’ contribution to rock art research by emphasizing theory and methodology drawn from ethnography. Contributors explore what it means to understand and learn from rock art, and a contrast is drawn between those sites where it is possible to provide a modern, ethnographic context, and those sites where it is not. This is the definitive guide to the interplay between ethnography and rock art interpretation, and is an ideal resource for students and researchers alike.

From the high plains of Canada to caves in the southeastern United States, images etched into and painted on stone by ancient Native Americans have aroused in observers the desire to understand their origins and meanings. Rock paintings and engravings can be found in nearly every state and province, and each region has its own distinctive story of discovery and evolving investigation of the rock art record. Rock art in the twenty-first century enjoys a large and growing popularity fueled by scholarly research and public interest alike. This book explores the history of rock art research in North America and is the only volume in the past twenty-five years to provide coverage of the subject on a continental scale. Written by contributors active in rock art research, it examines sites that provide a cross-section of regions and topics and complements existing books on rock art by offering new information, insights, and approaches to research. The first part of the volume explores different regional approaches to the study of rock art, including a set of varied responses to a single site as well as an overview of broader regional research investigations. It tells how Writing-on-Stone in southern Alberta, Canada, reflects changing thought about rock art from the 1870s to today; it describes the role of avocational archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley, where rock art styles differ on each side of the river; it explores discoveries in southwestern mountains and southeastern caves; and it integrates the investigation of cupules along Georgia’s Yellow River into a full study of a site and its context. The book also compares the differences between rock art research in the United States and France: from the outset, rock art was of only marginal interest to most U.S. archaeologists, while French prehistorians considered cave art an integral part of archaeological research. The book’s second part is concerned with working with the images today and includes coverage of gender interests, government sponsorship, the role of amateurs in research, and chronometric studies. Much has changed in our understanding of rock art since Cotton Mather first wrote in 1714 of a strange inscription on a Massachusetts boulder, and the cutting-edge contributions in this volume tell us much about both the ancient place of these enduring images and their modern meanings. Discovering North American Rock Art distills today’s most authoritative knowledge of the field and is an essential volume for both specialists and hobbyists.