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Rock art traditions in southern Africa. (A) San rock painting. The eared cap worn by the bowman indicates that he is a ‘shaman of the game.’ (B) San pecked rock engraving of a rhinoceros. (C) Geometric Khoekhoen rock paintings contrast sharply with two San depictions of eland. (D) A Late White Bantu-speakers’ rock painting of a colonial settler. 

Rock art traditions in southern Africa. (A) San rock painting. The eared cap worn by the bowman indicates that he is a ‘shaman of the game.’ (B) San pecked rock engraving of a rhinoceros. (C) Geometric Khoekhoen rock paintings contrast sharply with two San depictions of eland. (D) A Late White Bantu-speakers’ rock painting of a colonial settler. 

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Southern African rock art research has progressed from an essentially denigrating social and political milieu, through an empiricist period, to contemporary social and historical approaches. Empiricism, once thought to be the salvation of southern African rock art research, was a theoretically and methodologically flawed enterprise. Attempts to see...

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... The Munda, Birhor and Oraon communities of the study area practice indigenous art in form of Sohrai and Khovar paintings, and they carry on the tradition of spiritual belief and folklore related to rock art present near the modern settlement (Rajak 2019a). Whitley (1992) and Williams (2006), proposed a way in which rock art and ethnographic phenomena can be approached. Rock art ethnography gives us context within which the plausibility of any particular rock art interpretation can be assessed. ...
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... From the 1970s a shift from describing styles and sequences to an engagement with ethnography led to a globally influential new paradigm (Lewis-Williams, 1981), affording entrée to the social contexts of rock art and the meanings of imagesand from the meanings of images to a new understanding of the art as being essentially shamanistic (Lewis-Williams, 2006). This new appreciation of San rock art drew on the long-neglected late nineteenth century Bleek and Lloyd archive of interviews with Karoo |xam informants, alongside twentieth century ethnographies from the Kalahari; interpreted, in turn, relative to Mircea Eliade's synthesis of material on 'shamanism', a universal category established in anthropology and the history of religion (Tomášková, 2013). ...
... Exemplifying an ascendant rigour and striving after objectivity, the Scherz couple described, traced, photographed, and catalogued images and panels which were systematically numbered. This may not in and of itself have delivered any major breakthrough for understanding rock art (Lewis-Williams, 2006), but the more accurate documentation might have helped to constrain the kind of subjectivity and rampant speculation that most diminished Breuil'sand Mary Boyle'swork. ...
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... El marcado aumento en el éxito comenzaría a principios de la década de 1970, cuando se comenzó a adoptar un enfoque etnográfico, aderezado con la teoría social, y que, durante las siguientes tres décadas y más, produjo resultados que constituyeron la base de una nueva teoría y método. (Lewis-Williams 2006a: 369) El núcleo de esta nueva base fue el chamanismo, presentado por primera vez como un razonamiento etnográfico analógico sólido y, por lo tanto, una mejora real con respecto a la investigación empirista anterior (Lewis Williams 1991, 2006a. ...
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... The first was that there appeared to be substantial differences between the Strandberg engravings and the imagery associated with the painted art of the Maloti-Drakensberg. This latter body of art has clear associations with altered-states of consciousness and shamanistic activity (as described above, although see Lewis-Williams & Pearce 2015 for discussion on this topic in particular), and, accordingly, the dominant motifs relate in an appreciable way to Bushman religious practice (see Lewis-Williams 2006b). Amongst this common body of symbols is the eland (and/or ontologically equivalent animal symbols; e.g. ...
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Southern Africa’s Orange River has been a frontier-zone for centuries, acting as a socially formative and often volatile expression of its surrounds. Communities of the region have competed, compounded, and admixed for as long as competing influences have obliged it, contributing over hundreds of years to a background milieu of generally-coherent beliefs and practices; ‘frontier ideologies’ that dealt in the expression and mediation of identity, and the configuration of responses to tumultuous social and ecological conditions. The common core of these ideologies allowed frontier societies to respond to one another in familiar terms, even if other channels of meaning were inaccessible. One of the contributors to these ideologies were the |Xam, most well-known for their contributions to the shamanistic approach to interpretation of rock art in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of South Africa. While analogy has allowed them to speak on behalf of the artists of this disparate tradition, they are products of the area surrounding the Orange River during the nineteenth century. Accordingly, they demonstrate the fundamental features of a frontier society; they evaluate contact with other communities relative to themselves, and formulate appropriate expressions of identity to enact in response. The application of their ethnography is somewhat burdened by their application to the rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg, however, which casts their motivations in specific, ritualised terms. This thesis considers a very different body of rock art to the one conventionally interpreted by the shamanistic approach, but located in a historical and regional context intimately linked to the |Xam informants; specifically, the rock art of the Strandberg hills, in the Northern Cape province, South Africa. This body of art is one dominated by horses, distributed as a structure that spans much of the site, and manufactured with visibility in mind. This thesis finds that these images were products of the frontier ideologies that inhabited the region, and the adaptive practices that emerge from them. Accordingly, the art is characterised as a record of inhabitation, an expression of identity, and the mediation of contact with a changing landscape, in keeping with the behaviours that had marked interactions between communities in the region for long before many of the images were placed on the Strandberg.
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A San rock art site near the town of Wepener (Free State Province, South Africa) is considered by local inhabitants to depict specific historical events of the nineteenth century. This chapter describes the paintings and—using ethnographic evidence—dispels romantic myths: the site is not a mere “narrative” of actual events but rather a manifestation of the cosmological belief systems of the San.
... Depictions of Europeans and other agriculturalists, therefore, represent the San negotiation of power with those settlers in the spirit world; there is no evidence to suggest that actual (historical) events-whether antagonistic or not-are depicted. Moreover, the production of rock art-both before and after the arrival of European settlers-was an engaging process; paintings were not simply illustrative, commemorative, representative, or reflective depictions-they were powerful things in themselves, and reservoirs of potency (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1989;Lewis-Williams 1995;Lewis-Williams 2006). Paintings also helped to "dissolve" the rock face membrane between this world and the next (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1990; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004). ...