digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.21324
- Description
-
Digital photograph (colour); view of painted rock art showing two human figures and the figures of two giraffes and several unidentified shapes. The figures are upright and facing left. The giraffe figures are central, outlined in brown and white, naturalistic in outline but with grid-style coat pattern markings in white and brown faces. One giraffe is visible only as a neck below the other, depicted as if behind the other. Narrow, waving vertical parallel brown lines are painted as if running from the base of the upper giraffe’s neck, behind the other and down the tableau. Two curved brown vertical parallel lines are at the centre and left of the image, with further narrow lines to the far left, running into three human figures at the lower left, which are very faded. Tsisab Ravine, Namibia.
Scanned
- Production date
-
July 1996 (original photograph)
-
28 April 2006 (date digitized)
- Dimensions
-
File size: 120 megabytes
-
Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
- Detail of 2013,2034.21325.
Around 20km wide, the almost circular granitic intrusion of the Brandberg contains Namibia’s highest point at over 2,500 ft., and contains around 1,000 rock art sites, with around 50,000 individual figures recorded. These include both paintings and engravings but paintings form the majority. From the 1960s onward, the comprehensive research project investigating the archaeology of South West Africa run by the University of Cologne and sponsored by the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft supported the work of Ernst Scherz and Harald Pager recording engravings and paintings from the Brandberg. From 1977, Pager began a seven year project of recording painted rock art sites in the Brandberg, documenting around 43,000 individual images. Pager’s corpus has been organised and published posthumously by Tilman Lenssen-Erz in the six-volume Rock Paintings of the Upper Brandberg, as a result of which the Brandberg is one of the most comprehensively documented rock art regions on earth.
Namibia is home to over 1,200 rock art sites countrywide. Rock art is found across the country from the southern border almost to the northern border, although rock art sites are scarce in the far north. The majority of known rock art sites are found in the rocky and mountainous areas forming the escarpment edge in the west of the country. Particular concentrations of rock art are found in the west-centre of the country, north of the edge of the Namib’s coastal sand sea. Namibia’s most well-known rock art locales are clustered in this area, among them the Brandberg (also known as Dâures) and Erongo mountains and the Spitzkoppe peaks, as well as the well-known engraved rock art complex at Twyfelfontein | /Ui-//aes.
Much of the painted and engraved rock art in Namibia may be broadly compared to the wider hunter-gatherer-fisher rock art tradition found throughout southern Africa, similar in theme and composition and believed to be a part of the same general tradition, although some geometric and schematic rock art has been attributed to herder people and some finger paintings appear to have been painted later which fit neither tradition.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.21324
- Additional IDs
-
Previous owner/ex-collection number: NAMBRT0010002 (TARA number)
