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2 • Cartographic Content of Rock Art in Southern Africa 2 • Cartographic Content of Rock Art in Southern Africa TIM MAGGS Africa has an unassailable claim, based on the fossil and which occur in all areas of the subcontinent where the archaeological evidence, to be considered the cradle of local geology and geomorphology has allowed the for­ humankind and of culture. Much of the current debate on mation of caves and rock-shelters, and also engravings, the emergence of anatomically modern humans and of which are found in many of the drier central and western modern modes of behavior, including the origins of art, areas where there are suitable rock outcrops. Where this likewise centers on the African evidence. Although little art can be linked to particular groups of people, it is al­ evidence of early art has yet been forthcoming from tropi­ most always to Khoisan hunter-gatherers, a group popu­ cal Africa, in southern Africa, defined here as south of the larly, though often derogatorily, called Bushmen or San Zambezi and Cunene Rivers (fig. 2.1), rock art has been by others. dated to at least twenty-five thousand years ago. This Interpretation of southern African rock art has pro­ places the origins of African rock art in the same age ceeded through the twentieth century with a series of range as the oldest art anywhere in the world. wide pendulum swings. The most important advance In southern Africa, a significant change took place in has come in the past two decades with the pioneer­ the Stone Age sequence about thirty thousand years ago, ing work of Vinnicombe, Lewis-Williams, and others. leading to what is known as the Later Stone Age. This cul­ They have combined meticulous study of the art itself, the tural phase, though not closely similar to the European findings of modern anthropological research on the last Upper Paleolithic, is nevertheless similarly associated surviving hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, and an intense with painting and engraving on rock. Little can yet be reworking of the nineteenth-century ethnography, re­ said about the art of the earlier millennia, but the past five corded mainly by the Bleek family from surviving hunter­ thousand years certainly saw an extensive production of gatherers of the Cape Province. 1 images on the rocks. These images include paintings, There is little direct link between the ethnography, both nineteenth- and twentieth-century, and the rock art. Pre­ 20' cious little is recorded on what the communities who ac­ tually created the rock art thought about it. In fact most ANGOLA \ of the ethnography has come from areas where there is little or no rock art, while the best-known art is from areas where little or no ethnography was recorded before 20' the demise of hunter-gatherers. It has therefore been dif­ NAMIBIA ficult to understand the art and the motivation behind it. The extensive nineteenth-century records were largely in­ comprehensible (they were relegated to the category of mythology) until recent anthropological studies shed light on the cosmology of surviving Kalahari hunter-gatherers. Central to the new paradigm is the role of shamanistic religion, now known to have characterized Khoisan 30 1. The first major works in this new paradigm of research were Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Dra­ \ kensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of Their Life and Thought (Pieter­ \ maritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976), and J. David Lewis­ 10' 20' 30' Williams, Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings (London: Academic Press, 1981). There is now an ex­ FIG. 2.1. REFERENCE MAP OF SOUTHERN AFRICA. This tensive literature, particularly by Lewis-Williams and his students and map shows the location of places mentioned in the text. colleagues, 13 14 Traditional Cartography in Africa hunter-gatherer societies. The art is considered to reflect the past few centuries before the imposition of colo­ this religion to a large extent, including the mystical ex­ nial rule, we are able to place most engravings in the past periences and visions of the shaman during trance cere­ five hundred years, although the arrival of agriculturists monies. This interpretation would clearly deny the art an in southern Africa is dated more than a thousand years essentially cartographic nature unless cartography is de­ earlier. fined broadly to include cosmographical subjects. The hunter-gatherer art, widely scattered in many An earlier generation of rock art researchers, mainly thousands of sites, is a rich graphic resource, though in amateurs with a great deal of field experience in finding the present context there are only a few elements relevant and recording rock art, did consider a few examples of to cartography. On the other hand, the agriculturist en­ the art as depicting landscape features. In general these gravings, much rarer and limited to a few areas, are cen­ researchers were operating within a nontheoretical para­ trally concerned with understanding the spatial elements digm developed between the 1950s and 1970s in reac­ of major importance to the community. tion to the hyperdiffusionism of Henri Breuil and others who saw southern African art as the creation of offshoots THE HUNTER-GATHERER ART from Mediterranean "civilizations." 2 Examples where the rather literal interpretations of this approach have This art is essentially figurative in content; the vast given way to more complex interpretations in keeping majority of images represent humans, animals, or theri­ with the shamanistic paradigm are included below (see anthropes (figures combining human and animal charac­ plate 1 and fig. 2.4). Although the current climate of in­ teristics). In earlier decades of research, a few claims were terpretation would therefore argue against elements of made that individual examples of rock art might be a the art representing actual landscape features, there are form of map.4 These were usually compositions with lines certain aspects that appear to be involved with spatial un­ sometimes linking other motifs, including figures. Au­ derstanding at a cosmological level, and these will be dis­ thors writing before about 1980 tended to regard these cussed below. lines as paths or rivers. Within the current shamanistic In addition to the Stone Age culture, two other life­ framework of interpretation, however, such compositions styles reached southern Africa within the past two thou­ would be regarded as more metaphysical than physical in sand years, before the advent of European colonialism. nature. Pastoralists of Khoisan origin occupied parts of the drier This shift in interpretation is well illustrated by the west and southwest, while Bantu-speaking agriculturists scene known as "Fight and Flight," from Clanwilliam in with a metal technology covered the east wherever rain­ the western Cape (plate 1). In 1979 this was considered fall was adequate for crop production. Archaeologists are to be a straightforward depiction of a fight between two still not in agreement on whether the pastoralists con­ hunter-gatherer groups, one trapped in a rock-shelter tributed anything at all to rock art. The categories of from which a few individuals had managed to escape, images most likely to have been done by pastoralists­ their routes being shown as lines. 5 By 1990 several handprints and dot patterns-currently are not interpreted discrepancies in this interpretation were noted. For ex­ spatially, so this category of the art need not concern us ample, one of the peripheral figures holds a coil of the here. Rock art by the agriculturists, however, though still line, indicating it represents something less conventional little known and researched, has a dominant cartographic than a footpath. Furthermore, the line the attackers stand theme and therefore needs to be covered in some detail. on joins up with the bow and head of one of the other Some paintings, notably of the "late white" series, are group. Recent reviewers point to ethnographic evidence attributed to agriculturist societies. These images, that in the hunter-gatherer religion healing was regarded widespread in southern Africa and as far north as Tanza­ nia, are the work of many different communities but are 2. See, for example, Henri Breuil, The White Lady ofBrandberg, rev. linked by being mostly white or yellow-white finger ed., vol. 1 of The Rock Paintings of Southern Africa (Paris: Trianon paintings with a major human and animal theme. 3 How­ Press, 1966), esp. 9-15. ever, the more common images associated with agricul­ 3. Frans E. Prins and Sian Hall, "Expressions of Fertility in the Rock Art of Bantu-Speaking Agriculturists," African Archaeological Review turist communities, and those that are predominantly of 12 (1994): 171-203. a cartographic nature, are pecked or scratched engravings 4. Some examples can be found in Harald L. Pager, Ndedema: done on exposed rock outcrops close to the archaeologi­ A Documentation of the Rock Paintings of the Ndedema Gorge cal remains of settlements of these people. The close prox­ (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1971), esp. 325-26 and imity of the buildings to the engravings, and the fact that fig. 212, and D. Neil Lee and H. C. Woodhouse, Art on the Rocks o{ they reflect the same ground plan, allows for detailed Southern Africa (Cape Town: Purnell, 1970), esp. 139-48. 5. R. Townley Johnson, Major Rock Paintings of Southern Africa: comparison as well as dating. Because the settlement pat­ Facsimile Reproductions, ed. T. M. O'C. (Tim] Maggs (Cape Town: terns are those that characterized these communities in D. Philip, 1979),63-64 and pI. 67. Cartographic Content ofRock Art in Southern Africa 15 FIG. 2.2. PORTION OF BAMBOO MOUNTAIN PANEL. a record of an actual event. Original from the southern Natal This is an elaborate scene of mounted hunter-gatherers re­ Drakensberg, painted panels removed in sections to the Natal turning to their camp.
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