digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.18550
- Description
-
Digital photograph (colour); view of painted rock art showing eleven human figures, the figures of five unidentified quadrupeds and several unidentified shapes. All the figures are upright and infilled in brown. The human figures form a horizontal row at the base of the image, with three above and nine below. They surround the animal figures which have long bodies reminiscent of cattle or eland antelope and tails resembling those of lions (rain animals?). A row of white dots runs horizontally along the top of the image. A 10cm photo scale is fitted at the base of the image. Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.
Scanned
- Production date
-
06 July 2006 (date digitized)
-
May 1993 (original photograph)
- Dimensions
-
File size: 117 megabytes
-
Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
-
San rock art sometimes includes depictions of ambiguously shaped quadrupedal animal figures appearing somewhere between a hippopotamus, an elephant and/or an eland and with other unusual characteristics which correspond to no known species. Known to researchers as “rain animals” or “rain bulls”, these figures may reflect a specific element of San cosmology related to rain and rain-making rituals.
-
The Drakensberg forms the mountainous eastern edge of the Great Escarpment in South Africa. The Drakensberg’s southern portion extends north from the Eastern Cape province to form the province of KwaZulu-Natal’s borders with Lesotho and the Free State province. These mountains and foothills host many rock art sites, with several hundred rock shelters, containing many thousands of individual paintings, found throughout the area. Shelters are often found where the band of sandstone at the base of the high scarp has been weathered in, providing people from the San hunter-gatherer communities who formerly lived there with smooth painting surfaces.
Paintings in the area made by San people and their ancestors largely depict human and animal figures, in particular the large eland antelope and smaller antelope such as rhebok. Animal depictions are often naturalistic and may include one or more colour combinations. Sometimes they are executed using a blending technique referred to as ‘shaded polychrome’. Animals other than antelope are sometimes depicted, including lions and birds, but the eland figure in particular predominates. In addition, many sites include images of human tools and implements such as bows and arrows. Several other types of image are found in Drakensberg rock art which are less easily recognisable, including part-human, part-animal figures known by scholars as 'therianthropes', animals of indeterminate species and non-figurative motifs such as lines and dots. There are also some images of horses and other domestic animals.
The existence of rock art in this area has been known among communities there from before it stopped being produced (at some time in the late 19th century AD) and in the 1870s and 80s Mark and Graham Hutchinson made copies of some Drakensberg rock art. Interest in the sites from the perspective of archaeological and anthropological researchers was piqued in the early 20th century. In 1929 a portion of the team from an expedition mounted by German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius recorded Drakensberg rock art sites and with the advent of colour photography several more recording expeditions and publications were made in the following decades, for example by Alexander Willcox, and Neil Lee and Bert Woodhouse. In the late 1950s and 60s respectively, Patricia Vinnicombe and Harald Pager began more rigorous and comprehensive exercises in surveying and copying from rock art sites in the area. In 1976, Vinnicombe published the seminal work "People of the Eland", an exploration of the composition and meaning of the rock art of a particular survey area. Following this came the work of David Lewis-Williams and many others, with much study of rock art in the area continuing.
As with most rock art, dating is uncertain but work with AMS dating at Main Caves has tentatively dated some painting to as much as 2,900 years ago, though it is thought that much of Drakensberg rock art is more recent.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.18550
- Additional IDs
-
Previous owner/ex-collection number: SOANEC0020013 (TARA number)