Phytanthropes Human-Plant Conations in the Rock Art of Zimbabwe
Stephen van den Heever Stephen van den Heever completed an Honours degree in Archaeobotany from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015. He then held the position of tracing technician at the Rock Art Research Institute. “The author wants to acknowledge the help provided by Jeremy Hollmann, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, who helped him signicantly with the ideas about ‘phytanthropes’ and was therefore and invaluable contributor to this publication.”
Introduction In San cosmology, little distinction is made between the natural and human world because the lives and roles of humans, animals, plants, natural phenomenon, and landscape are inseparably intertwined and intermeshed one with another. Previously, researchers have looked at animals, weather, and health but little attention has been given to plants beyond their prosaic uses. Yet plants are an intrinsic part of hunter-gatherer lives. They play a significant role in every aspect of their existence, from subsistence and medicine to magic, religion, ritual, and mythology. In order to get a more complete understanding of San cultures, this lacuna must be redressed because there is evidence of the importance of plant-people relationships deeply intrenched in San cosmology. To open a discussion on a wider array of beliefs and ontologies of San groups, I use phytanthropic (part plant, part human) motifs found in rock art, in conjunction with ethnobotanical records from elsewhere in southern Africa, focusing on the relationships between Zimbabwean hunter-gatherers and plants.
Botanical motifs Botanical motifs have been recorded in the huntergatherer rock art across much of southern Africa, yet the vast majority occur in Zimbabwe. These motifs are found
48
Lesedi #23 | Field notes | IFAS-Research | November 2020
in seven of the ten Zimbabwean provinces, with 53% found in Mashonaland East. Botanical motifs are highly schematized, although some types, like trees, are still easily recognisable as, what Taylor (1927 in Mguni 2009) calls ‘conventional trees’. It is because many rock art researchers have posited that these plants are unidentifiable (Garlake, 1995; Walker, 1996; Hubbard, 2013). However, this is only the case if researchers try to identify the plants based on western taxonomic classifications and not the culturally specific classificatory system that the painter likely would have used. Using the above analytical method, in conjunction with relevant ethnographic material, has allowed me to allocate the content of botanical motifs into seven categories: trees, tubers, leaves, fruit, flowers, mushrooms and phytanthropes.
Phytanthropes One of the most interesting and, to date, unstudied subsets of botanical motifs are phytanthropes (from the Greek phytos – pertaining to plants, and anthropos – human). Phytanthropes are beings found in the Zimbabwean rock art that combine the features of humans and plants, similar to the way that therianthropes combine features of humans and animals. Phytanthropes are rare and have not been described in reports of the rock art of the rest of southern Africa.
