Professional Documents
Culture Documents
edited by
Geoffrey BluNDell
Christopher ChippiNDAle
BeNjAmiN smith
Seeing AND
Knowing UNDerstANDiNg rock Art
with AND withoUt ethNogrAphy
this is the third volume in the Rock Art Research institute Monograph Series
edited by
geoffrey BlUNDell
christopher chippiNDAle
BeNjAMiN sMith
Published in South Africa by
The publishers gratefully acknowledge financial support for this publication from the Rock Art Research Institute,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the Rock Art Endowment Fund of the Rock Art Research Institute.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the
publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Acronyms xiii
Chapter 3 Snake and veil: the rock engravings of driekopseiland, northern Cape, 37
South Africa
DAViD Morris
Driekopseiland 37
Who, and why? Stow’s account 38
Bushman or Korana – and other preoccupations 39
What, and how old? 40
Towards an archaeological context 42
Towards meaning 43
Driekopseiland landscape and history 48
Chapter 6 Archaeology, ethnography, and rock art: A modern-day study from tanzania 99
iMogeNe l. liM
Tanzania: Rock art and ethnography 99
Location, location, location 100
Sandawe praxis: Iyari 102
Metaphors for fertility: Objects and colour 107
Rain-calling 109
Archaeology and ethnography in rock art studies: Lessons from the Sandawe 111
Chapter 7 Art and belief: the ever-changing and the never-changing in the Far west 117
DAViD s. whitley
Ethnography and North American rock art 118
Beyond the tyranny of the ethnographic record 123
The conservatism of culture 124
The essentialist challenge 126
Situating cultural stability and change 126
Making supernatural power personal: The emergence of Numic bands and headmen 127
Long-term uses of summarising symbols 127
Elaborating symbols: Where power becomes personal 127
Conservatism versus change 129
Chapter 8 Crow indian elk love-medicine and rock art in Montana and wyoming 139
lAwreNce l. loeNDorf
Love-magic and the American elk 139
Elk images at rock art sites in Montana and Wyoming 141
Summary 145
Chapter 9 Layer by layer: Precision and accuracy in rock art recording and dating 149
johANNes loUBser
Background: Informed and formal approaches in conjunction 149
El Ratón and its rock paintings 150
People of the Sierra de San Francisco 151
Recording methods and techniques 153
Relative stratigraphy and dating at El Ratón 156
Provisional sequence at El Ratón and some implications for interpretation 163
Placement and depiction of motifs in El Ratón 164
Chapter 12 thinking strings: on theory, shifts and conceptual issues in the study of 199
Palaeolithic art
MArgAret w. coNkey
After a founding text 199
On theory and theorising 201
Shifts in and for the study of Palaeolithic art 203
Intellectual shifts and new perspectives 203
Thinking strings: Some different conceptual directions 205
Are there ‘conclusions’? 209
Chapter 13 Rock art without ethnography? A history of attitude to rock art and landscape 215
at Frøysjøen, western norway
eVA wAlDerhAUg
Rock art and ethnography 215
Rock art of western Norway and western Mozambique 216
‘Pre-contact’ natural history and ethnohistory at Frøysjøen 220
The ‘post-contact’ period: A grand discovery, and its aftermath 222
Frøysjøen ‘ethnography’ and the making of the hunting-magic explanation 224
After hunting magic: The past in the present 227
Romancing a mountain: Folklore and myth at Frøysjøen 228
In the footsteps of Gjessing until paths divide: A brief return to southern Africa 230
The value of present-day ethnographies and ethnohistory 232
contents
Chapter 15 Manica rock art in contemporary society 251
tore sætersDAl
Studying rock art in Manica Province, Mozambique 251
The geography of Manica 251
The rock art of Manica 252
Manica Valley 252
Art in the Guidingue area 254
Archaeological excavations 257
Shona history and ethnohistory 258
Discussion: Art then and art now 262
Chapter 16 oral tradition, ethnography, and the practice of north American archaeology 269
jUlie e. frANcis AND lAwreNce l. loeNDorf
The changing shape of North American archaeology 269
Rock art and the ‘new archaeology’ 270
Rock art and the ‘newer archaeology’ 271
Examples: Ethnography, oral tradition and understanding 271
Integration of ethnographic information and traditional archaeological data: Implications for archaeology 276
Chapter 17 beyond rock art: Archaeological interpretation and the shamanic frame 281
Neil price
Introduction: Southern African rock art research, in southern Africa and elsewhere 281
Diversity and definition in a shamanic archaeology 282
Shamanism: The big question 283
The antiquity of shamanism 284
Shamanism and the indigenous voice 286
Archaeological interpretation and the shamanic frame 286
index 305
contributors xi
Patricia Vinnicombe nick walker
Patricia Vinnicombe passed away during the prepara- 8 Andrew Joss Street, Mossel Bay, 6506,
tion of this volume. The editors pay tribute to an South Africa
archaeologist who made an exceptional contribution nwalke@telkomsa.net
the field of rock art studies.
david S. whitley
eva walderhaug ASM Affiliates, Tehachapi CA, USA
National Directorate for Cultural Heritage huitli53@gmail.com
PO Box 8196 Dep., 0034 Oslo, Norway
esw@ra.no
contents xiii
Figure 1.1 In the field, 1996: David Lewis-Williams (right) with Jean Clottes (left) in front of the main panel, with its famous frieze
of eland at Game Pass Shelter in the Drakensberg.
The Lewis-wiLLiams revoLuTion: rejected and replaced with approaches based on San
studying rock art in southern africa and beyond cognition and ethnohistory – concerns which con-
tinue to be strong in the region and are increasingly
The overall theme and structure of this book serve to influential outside it. In particular, studies of the
explore how best we study rock art when there exist meanings of San rock art have received wide notice.
ethnographic or ethnohistoric bases of insight, and This is more than a local or a regional concern. For
how we study rock art when there do not appear to a century – ever since the unexpected discoveries of Ice
be ethnographic or ethnohistoric bases of insight – in Age rock art in its deep caves astonished Europe –
short, how we understand and learn from rock art researchers have found rock art difficult. Striking
with and without ethnography. We are not aware of though it often is in its aesthetic force, it has been hard
an exact precedent for this, although the way archae- to date and hard to make sense of within conventional
ologists work best with and without ethnography is a archaeological frameworks. So observant, so well done,
perpetual issue of the discipline. so accomplished, it must have meant something in
The ten years between 1967 and 1977 were, we ancient times – but what? In South Africa, David
can now see, a revolutionary period in southern Lewis-Williams has accurately called the well-meaning
African rock art research. In those years the older, and unhappy approaches that resulted ‘gaze and guess’
colonial approaches to studying San rock art were (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 2000). Guesses have come
1
and gone in passing fashions over the decades as African example as a beacon in that darkness of gloom
archaeologists have struggled with rock art – from which sees the meaning of rock art as unknowable,
totemism to sympathetic magic to aesthetic self-enjoy- and therefore the whole enterprise of studying it as
ment to daily narrative to structuralism, back to permanently stuck. If meaning can be known in South
totemism (Jones 1967) and so on – in a way that gives Africa and is known, then perhaps it can be and
no confidence that the present fashion will be more should be known elsewhere? Perhaps the particular
than a passing phase, or even that knowledge accumu- approaches that seemed to work in South Africa could
lates, building and extending from stage to stage. Ideas work in other places: what, for example, if the great
seem just to flit about, one sometimes popular and one many volumes of ethnography for the American West,
sometimes not, within much the same level of neces- diligently published many decades ago and now lan-
sary ignorance. An influential textbook published in guishing on the library shelves, actually preserved eth-
England at the start of that transforming South African nohistoric records pertinent to rock art, records which
decade, Peter Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld’s Palaeolithic could offer a route to insight as the Bleek and Lloyd
Cave Art (1967), surveyed those various ideas about (1911) records do for the San? What if the knowledge
European rock art’s meaning which had been or then of Native Americans today, and their own reactions
were variously in vogue. It showed well how many and to rock art, gave clues to ancient meanings just as the
fatal were their weaknesses, but that textbook was ret- knowledge and ritual of San people today, people who
icent when it came to recommending where a better do not themselves paint rock art, gave insight into the
way forward might be found. An influential commen- southern African images? What if the iconographic
tator today insists that the meaning of ancient art must elements recognised as distinctive in South Africa had
always be unknowable: ‘gaze and guess’ is the best we parallels in the American West? And what if, even
can do, and since guesses make no useful knowledge, where the specifics of the South African example
we do best just to gaze. seemed less easy to follow, the success of the enter-
It is largely through the work of David Lewis- prise encouraged the potential optimist to believe that
Williams and his colleagues at this time that San rock by seeing the rock art in the right kinds of ways, what-
art has come to be understood so well, as a complex ever those might be in any one region, actual research
symbolic and metaphoric representation of San reli- progress might be made in areas of research where
gious beliefs and practices. As chapters in this volume glum pessimism was the habit?
acknowledge, seminal to this enterprise was Lewis- Rock art research is not a confined business. In par-
Williams’ PhD thesis, ‘Believing and Seeing: An allel with developing research in South Africa, there
Interpretation of Symbolic Meanings in Southern San has been much activity and important new work in
Rock Paintings’. Completed in 1977 and then pub- other regions. Sometimes, especially in Australia with
lished by Academic Press, London, in 1981, Believing its astonishingly rich insights from ethnographic
and Seeing was a landmark because it employed San records and contemporary Aboriginal knowledge (e.g.
ethnography in order to tease out the semantic spec- Layton 1992; Chaloupka 1993; Doring 2000), this
trum of key San symbols, first within their ritual life, has paralleled advances in South Africa. And, after too
then within their rock art in two areas within the long a period when rock art research in North America
Drakensberg Mountains. Believing and Seeing is fre- has been marginal, it is rapidly advancing there.
quently remembered now as the work which persua-
sively argued that Drakensberg San rock art is
essentially shamanistic in nature. It actually did some- The duaL eThnographiC-neuro -
thing rather different in identifying San rock art as psyChoLogiCaL approaCh: The classic
referring to the multiplicity of San rituals, of which style of study in the classic area
the central shamanic curing dance was only one.
In this book dedicated to David, we mention his It was in the later 1980s that South African interpre-
key role but not those of others in any detail, some of tations of San art began to concentrate on shamanism.
whom are themselves contributors to this book. There were two reasons for this. First, as researchers
Instead, we point to the importance of the South studied imagery farther and farther afield, both within
A standard and natural feature of archaeological work undersTanding roCk arT: informed
is its regional focus: the starting point of systematic methods, formal methods, and the
knowledge is the material evidence in a geographically uniformita rian issues
bounded unit. But alongside that is interest in com-
mon themes which unite scattered areas, and in com- The application of matching approaches to problems
mon research approaches which – once developed or so broadly separated takes us to the issues sometimes
proven in one region – are ready to address matching thought of as being to do with ‘systematics’ but in
problems elsewhere. More than most topics within truth better and correctly called uniformitarian issues.3
archaeology, rock art has been studied too much Archaeologists trying to make sense of the past do so
within a regional framework. Despite the isolation of by placing it in some relation to the present – for it is
South Africa in the apartheid era,1 and the barrier of only the present to which we have any direct access
distance that separates southern Africa from parts of and of which we can have direct knowledge. As soon
the world that are seen as central, a distinctive element as we say of some ancient thing, “This is an artefact”
in David’s work and in that of those who have learnt or “This is a rock painting”, we make an observation
from him either follows the methodology established reporting what happened in the past by the parallel of
by the classic approach in southern Africa and applies that material object with what we know of the present.
it elsewhere or, in a less specific way, jumps the So all issues of archaeological understanding have to
regional barrier.2 In North America and elsewhere, do with what the Victorians called ‘uniformitarianism’
rich ethnographic contexts offer new and powerful and its central paradox: we can understand and make
insights into the rock art – once the pertinence is sense of the past by its sameness, to the extent that it
acknowledged of the ethnohistoric records and of matches what we observe in the present, but a main
contemporary indigenous understandings. reason we are interested in the past, especially the
In other places, however, sparse records or the non- remote and other past, is that it shows or may show
existence of ethnographic records make interpretative great or fundamental difference.
exercises far more difficult. There we must turn more Applying methods developed in one region or for
from the ‘informed methods’ which ethnographic one type of material or with a certain source of social
insight offers towards the ‘formal methods’, those that knowledge to other regions or materials or social con-
deal with the material evidence to be found in the texts raises important questions of this uniformitarian
images themselves and their archaeological contexts kind – some of them about how we understand
(Taçon & Chippindale 1998). Chapters 7, 8, 9 and meaning in the art, about the social role of the images,
10 move outside southern Africa to varied other and about how we look at the images themselves.
consider the rock art of the Drakensberg; sage tricks into early farming and then Christian times (Lewis-
of the trade set out for students in Building an Essay: Williams & Pearce 2005; Lewis-Williams 2010) – to
A Practical Guide for Students (Lewis-Williams mention just the recent full-length books.
2004); San Spirituality: Roots, Expressions and Social On the occasion of David’s retirement, a celebra-
Consequences (Lewis-Williams & Pearce 2004), which tory conference was held at Goudrivier Farm in the
provides a synthesis of research into 70 000+ years of Waterberg, on 21–24 April 2000 (Figure 1.2). It was
art-marking in southern Africa; and his most recent a thrilling occasion, celebratory in its looking forward
books, Inside the Neolithic Mind and Conceiving God, more than backward, another beginning rather than
which continue the Mind in the Cave story, following an end. Most of the chapters in this book were given
the history of European cosmology and symbolism in a first form at that meeting, and have been revised
Figure 1.3 David Lewis-Williams tracing at ezeljagdspoort, the site of one of his famous early ethnographically informed
interpretations of San Rock Art.