The Diversity of the Common The Signiď€ cance of Spatial Motif Variation in Studying Cultural Variability using Rock Art in Zimbabwe
Ancila Nhamo Ancila Nhamo is currently a Research Specialist in Humanities and Social Sciences in the Research and Innovation Directorate at the University of Zimbabwe. Her job involves working with researchers, students and other interested individuals to conceptualize and accelerate research into usable products and services. She is also a senior lecturer of Archaeology and Heritage Studies in the Department of History. Ancila has several publications in peer reviewed local, regional and international journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. Her interests are in rock art, management, conservation and sustainable usage. She is also interested in archaeological heritage management in general.
Introduction Researchers in souther n Africa have widely acknowledged the existence of motif variation in the rock art of the region. However, little has been done to use the cultural rock art diversity to understand the social and economic structure of the prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The question is why were artists from different areas choosing different symbols? This paper examines case studies from Zimbabwe to illustrate ways in which variation in rock art motifs can allude to the social and economic dynamics among Late Stone Age huntergatherers. The fact that similar cultural diversity has been noted among contemporary hunter-gatherers from the Kalahari, whose culture is often used as for analogy with the prehistoric societies buttresses the argument for their existence in Late Stone Age communities. Hofstede (1980, p. 21-23) defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group from another�. Rock art, like other art forms, is a product of artists who, as members of their communities, are informed by the thought processes of the whole culture. Artists do not operate in a vacuum; rather, they draw their symbols from the shared, learned, and collective knowledge and expected patterns of behaviour (see Lewis-Williams, 1982, p. 429). As such, artists are informed and in turn, inform other
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Lesedi #23 | Field notes | IFAS-Research | November 2020
components of culture. The variation in rock art motifs across space should, therefore, be taken to reflect differences, though minute at times, in the cultures of the artists. It is, therefore, not only proper but imperative for archaeologists to research both commonalities and differences that exist in the art. Due to established shared underlying cognitive system among the hunter-gatherers all over most of Southern Africa (Lewis-Williams, 1982), most researchers in the last few decades have focused on the commonalities (e.g. Lewis-Williams, 1983; Walker, 1996; Garlake, 1995; Mguni, 2015; Eastwood and Eastwood, 2006; Nhamo, 2007). Although studying commonalities in the art has helped to explicate the culture of southern African hunter-gatherers in general, it has not delved into the differences that are obvious in the art and other material culture of the Late Stone Age period. Previous researchers who have worked on southern African rock art have observed the occurrence of variations of motifs across space (e.g. Burkitt, 1928; Lewis-Williams, 1983; Hampson et al., 2002; Bleek, 1932; Rudner and Rudner, 1970). Zimbabwean rock art is usually argued to be distinct to that from Namibia, Drakensberg/Maluti Mountains, Western Cape, etc. In spite of the problems of demarcating them, these geographic regions are implied in most of the studies on
