introduction
The Rock Art of the Hunter-Gatherers of Southern Africa
Léa Jobard, Carole Dudognon & Camille Bourdier After a century and a half of research, Southern African rock art is today built up on remarkable archaeological materials that make it possible to conceive, in the long term, the history of the hunter-gatherers who, for a long time, have been deprived of it. While the artistic testimonies of contemporary groups have drawn researchers’ attention at the very time when these populations were disappearing (Ego, 2000), the ethnographic and linguistic stories of the latest artists have tried to give meaning again to these works (Bleek, 1874, 1932; Orpen, 1874). Considered for a long time as the expression of the recent history of San populations, these artistic productions offer a visual quality that was lauded as early as the 19th century.They have been reproduced on the occasion of many redrawing campaigns, some of which have initiated parallels with European prehistory (Breuil, 1948). Covering a surface area of a few million square kilometres from Namibia to Mozambique, and from the north of Zimbabwe to the Cape of Good Hope, the abundant documentation work has revealed, among hunter-gatherer populations, a powerful traditional heritage of wall iconography. Within this common whole, a complex set of spatial variations leads to recognising four major “artistic” provinces: ZimbabweLimpopo, Namibia, South-Eastern Cape and the central plateau of South Africa, i.e. the Western Cape (LewisWilliams, 1983; Garlake, 1987; Parkington et al., 1994; Hampson et al., 2002; Eastwood and Eastwood 2006; Eastwood et al., 2010). Thanks to the theoretical and methodological renewal of the 1970s, approaches that, from then on, had turned to social anthropology and ethnography, shed light on the recurrence of the main designs and compositions beyond distances: a shamanic essence of which rock art would be the expression and
illustration (Vinnicombe, 1976; Lewis-Williams, 1983; Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1989; Lewis-Williams and Pearce, 2012; van den Heever, this issue; Witelson, this issue). Since the end of the 20th century, dating has become a fundamental issue in research, in order to consider the historical depth of this ontological-religious and sociocultural framework, as encouraged by the constant renewal of methodological approaches applied to rock art. According to the current data, in Southern Africa, graphic expression appeared during the Middle Stone Age in various sites, in the form of geometric decorations on raw materials or on objects (187 00050 000 years: Marean et al., 2007; Mackay and Welz, 2008; Henshilwood et al., 2009, 2014; D’Errico et al., 2012; Jacobson et al., 2012: Texier et al., 2013). The animals painted on the plaques of the Apollo 11 Rock Shelter in Namibia introduced figurative expression during the Late Middle Stone Age, around 30 000 years ago (Rifkin et al., 2015). Where rock art is concerned, direct dating (Mazel and Watchman, 1997; Bonneau et al., 2011) is currently associated with this practice for the Holocene Later Stone Age, although some archaeological contexts point towards initial evidence dating from the end of the Pleistocene (Walker, 1995). Many studies tend to reconsider the antiquity and, more generally, the age of these graphic productions. Direct dating is conditioned by the presence of specific elements in the way paintings are composed, which only concerns a minority of drawing styles, inciting researchers to innovate in their methods (Mullen, this issue). When the geomorphology of the site has led to their accumulation and conservation, archaeological deposits at the foot of or near decorated walls can hold precious data on the chrono-cultural framework of the
Lesedi #23 | Carnets de terrain | IFAS-Recherche | Novembre 2020
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