digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.19650
- Description
-
Digital photograph (colour); view of painted rock art showing a seated human figure, upright, facing right and infilled, facing a tasselled bag, with a patch of pigment below. A 10cm photo scale is fitted at the base of the image. West Coast District Municipality, South Africa.
Scanned
- Production date
- 04 July 2006 (date digitized. original photograph date unknown.)
- Dimensions
-
File size: 121 megabytes
-
Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
- There are over 2,500 known rock art sites in the Western Cape, with many more individual images within them. They appear for the most part to follow the same general artistic and cultural tradition as the paintings produced by San hunter-gatherer people and their ancestors elsewhere in South Africa. Paintings consist largely of human and animal figures, in particular the eland antelope. In addition, many sites include images of human tools and implements such as bows and arrows and others interpreted as bags and digging sticks. Several other types of image are found in San rock art which are less easily recognisable, including part-human, part-animal figures known by scholars as ‘therianthropes’, although these are not as common here as in the Drakensberg area. There are also animals of indeterminate species and non- figurative motifs such as lines, dots and other shapes.
There are certain regional characteristics of the art in the Western Cape, for example the emphasis on the human figure, with human figures more numerous than those of animals in the Cederberg area and a unique tradition of handprints near the west coast. There are some famous examples of so-called ‘contact art’ in the Western Cape, appearing to depict Europeans and their accoutrements such as wagons and horses or mules, although these images are rare. There are almost no images of cattle are found in the area, although there are several depictions of fat-tailed sheep. Sheep were introduced to the area around 2,000 years ago, with cattle appearing later, and it is thought that some Western Cape rock art may have been produced by Khoekhoe herder people.
In terms of direct dating, incised ochre from Blombos Cave on the southern coast has been dated to between 70 and 100,000 years ago, with some decorated ostrich eggshell fragments form Diepkloof have been dated to about 60,000 years ago. The earliest known rock painting dates in South Africa come from Steenbokfontein near the west coast where buried painted slabs were dated to about 3,600 years ago. It is thought that the majority of extant painted art in the area was made within the last 10,000 years, with some produced as late as the 19th Century AD or even later.
In the 1960s, Tim Maggs embarked on projects of quantitative study of images in the area. Western Cape rock art sites continue to be actively studied. Sites in the Cederberg Mountains, around 200km north of Cape Town, are particularly well-known.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.19650
- Additional IDs
-
Previous owner/ex-collection number: SOASWC0130104 (TARA number)