Dateless substance. White Pigments in the Rock Art of Southern Africa Alice Mullen

crossed views from southern africa

Dateless Substance

White Pigments in the Rock Art of Southern Africa

Alice Mullen

Alice Mullen has an MSc in Archaeology from the University of the Witwatersrand and has worked as a Tracing Technician at the Rock Art Research Institute. She specialises in the applications of New Animisms to San ontologies of rock art.

It is received wisdom in southern African rock art research that white pigments do not adhere to the rock face as well as other colours, and when present, indicate a more recent date – this coming, in part, from observable red and yellow antelope bodies whose once-white necks and heads have faded or disappeared (Bachelor 1990 in Meiklejohn, 1995; Loubser, 1991; Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1992; Pearce, 2006). There is no evidence, however, to pinpoint in time when this disappearance happens, nor the rate at which any attrition occurs. That visible white pigment signifies a relatively young age for paintings has become a particularly odd, yet pertinent, problem in research pertaining to ’contact’ rock art and the making of Bushman (San) history in southern Africa (Mazel, 1989, 1992, 1993; Dowson, 1993, 1994).

In the south-easter n mountains of the MalotiDrakensberg is a category of paintings known as Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs) – human forms that are more detailed and larger than those around them (Blundell, 2004). These oversized anthropomorphs were considered a recent phenomenon, created within the last two thousand years (after contact with incoming far mer g roups). The presence of white pigment, considered the most fleeting of pigments, was used as a proxy for recent production, based on sparse studies, some of which are described below. Developments in p i g m e n t c h a r a c t e r i z at i o n w i t h i n s o u t h e r n A f r i c a (Bonneau et. al, 2014), however, have shown that at least three distinct types of white paint materials (calcite, gypsum and white clay) were used by Bushman painters.

In addition, while no SDFs have been directly dated, some paintings associated with them have (Bonneau et al., 2017a, 2017b). These are for the most part shaded polychrome eland antelope which have white underparts, legs, heads and necks with black horns and hooves. Presuming that hoof, horn and white body parts were

Figure 1. Storm Shelter, the type site for ’Significantly Differentiated Figures’ (SDFs) mentioned in the text. ’A’ points towards a Large-Headed SDF; ’B’ points towards the black nose of an eland – directly dated to 2988-2381 cal. BP. Image: David Pearce.

painted at the same time as each other (retouching and overpainting notwithstanding) the date for the black parts is equal to the date for the whole. ‘Carbon black’ paint 1 samples from eland in association with SDFs have returned direct AMS radiocarbon dates well before the time of contact with other cultural groups – herder or farmer. These two scientific developments have brought to light interesting challenges for the interpretation of SDFs.

Rock art history and the creation of a category

Towards the end of South Africa’s Apartheid era, the academy became increasingly aware of its power to redress racist histories of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups (e.g Wright, 1971). The call resounded to write a new, inclusive history of South Africa that could be ’given back’ to Bushmen (Mazel, 1989). To this end, Thomas Dowson (1993, 1994) saw in the rock art of the Bushmen a unique capacity to provide a history of its makers unfettered by colonial narratives, texts or wester n techniques of analysis. Rock art was able to stand alone as evidence itself (Dowson, 1993). In what was historically called Nomansland, an area of the southeaster n mountains, he believed the ar t reflected a progressive shift in Bushman society, from egalitarian to stratified, an active response to increasing contact with incoming African farmer groups over the last 2000 years (Dowson, 1994, 1998). That such contact precipitated hierarchical stratification in society mirrored, in effect, what Mathias Guenther (1975) had obser ved among contemporary Ghazi Bushmen in Botswana and what Colin Campbell (1987) had applied to ‘contact’ rock art. R i t u a l s p e c i a l i s t s t r a d e d s p i r i t u a l a b i l i t i e s ( e. g. rainmaking) in return for material wealth (e.g. cattle) supposedly gaining superior hierarchal status over nonritual specialists. In the ar t, these processes were reproduced symbolically as an increasing detail and size afforded individual human figures culminating in large, decorated figures he called ’pre-eminent shamans’ (Dowson, 1994: 339). The sequence appeared to succeed in identifying individual agency in archaeology, and was thus not inconsequential in its contribution to rock art research. Lack of demonstrable and testable chronology would be an issue difficult for others to overlook, though Dowson himself rejected western chronology (Dowson, 1993: 642).

Geoffrey Blundell (2004), having inher ited the hierarc hical sc hema from Dowson (1994, 1998), renamed pre-eminent shamans SDFs, and to the category added what he ter med Large-Headed Significantly Differentiated Figures (LH-SDFs) – SDFs whose ‘postcranial bodies’ were smaller and less detailed than their heads (Blundell, 2004). SDFs, and later LH-SDFs represented the embodied experiences of formidable ‘potency-owners’ asserting their individuality by painting themselves as most prominent within a specific rock shelter (Blundell, 2004: 172). It was only within the last 500 years, when ritual specialists’ high status had been established and Europeans had arrived that the bodies of SDFs became less detailed (less important) and their heads enlarged and embellished (more important). Historical evidence attested to the presence, in this small part of Nomansland, of a group of Bushmen led by Nqabayo in the 1850s (Blundell, 2004). Blundell attempted, by sophisticated interweaving of historical text and rock ar t evidence (Smith, 2010), to link the images of SDFs and LH-SDFs to Nqabayo’s band. Ultimately, he acknowledged that without a form of chronological control he could not definitively link Nqabayo to these paintings, but remained convinced that they were, at the very least, a product of contact.

One form of chronological control Blundell did employ was the state of preservation of white pigment. The geology of the south-eastern mountains was deemed unsuitable for the long-term preservation of white paint; the porous, Clarens Formation sandstone shelters offer

1. Association here taken to mean any figure that is part of, or not yet demonstrated to be separate from, a composite panel of images that constitutes a whole.

crossed views from southern africa

insufficient protection from high summer rainfall common to the region (Blundell, 2004). The fact, then, that many of the images contained white paint in good condition was taken as compelling evidence that the images of SDFs and LH-SDFs were young. While the presence of visible white paint was certainly not the only reason adduced for SDFs and LH-SDFs being a recent phenomenon (subject matter, direct dating and historical material being the others) it did form a central component of the argument.

‘Notoriously fugitive’: white pigment and weathering

White pigment is assumed to be less robust and quicker to deteriorate because this is easily seen in many contexts. White parts of poly- or bi-chrome paintings sometimes cannot be discerned with the naked eye because they have faded or flaked away. It was not only observable deterioration, however, that propelled this notion to almost axiomatic status. Various (few and small) studies had been undertaken to identify the causes of differential deterioration in pigment samples from rock art in South Africa. The first scientific characterization of white paint identified a key difference between whites and other pigments sampled, particle size (Van Rijssen, 1987). White pigments comprised larger and less dense particles that were more resistant to bonding with binders than other colours, prohibiting them from penetrating the rock face, thus making them vulnerable to weather ing. Johannes Loubser (1991) came to the same realisation, which in turn was cited by Keith Meiklejohn (1995). These particle-size studies only consider white pigments composed of clays, however, and do not account for the lifespan of all white pigments. Besides particle size, various other natural weathering processes have been proposed as causes for accelerated deterioration in white paint, such as wider thermal variations in the mineral composition (Hall et al., 2007). Weathering of paint on the rock face is caused by a multitude of factors, and space does not permit further discussion of these (but see Meiklejohn, 1995). It is important to state that we cannot use the fugitive nature of white pigment as an indicator of age without considering that weathering, and therefore fading, is contingent on context, and that not all white pigments, or shelters in which white paintings exist, are subject to the same processes affecting preservation. In the early 1990s, Loubser (1991, 1992) had pointed out that some white pigments in fact last longer than some reds, although his obser vation seems to have gone unnoticed. He stressed the need to characterise these long-lasting white paints yet, to my knowledge, this endeavour was pursued no further. While the reason for so thinking is not given, the statements presumably must come from instances of superpositioning ‘show-through’ (where older white images show through underneath younger, faded, red ones). Loubser suspected that the longer-lasting white paints were physically and chemically different from the clays, but this was not demonstrated until Mazel and Watchman’s 1997 analysis of two samples, detailed below. By far the majority of early studies had returned results of clays (e.g. kaolinite) and this informed researchers’ suppositions for decades. The first extensive study to conclude that white pigments comprised clays was that of Rudner (1982) from an ethnographic and historical perspective. Scanning E l e c t r o n M i c r o s c o p y w i t h E n e r g y D i s p e r s i v e Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) was used as early as 1987 in the Cederberg and the Drakensberg, resulting in the identification of white pigments as pure clay (Van Rijssen, 1987, 1990). Ten years later, Mazel’s and Watchman’s (1997), as part of an accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) direct dating project, found white pigments sampled from Clarke’s and Nkosazana’s shelters in the Drakensberg to be calcite and quartz, and gypsum, quartz and clay respectively. At Barnes’ Shelter in the Giant’s Castle area white pigment sampled from a fallen painted flake was shown, using Raman spectroscopy, to contain white clay or shale (Prinsloo et al., 2008). Aurélie Tournié et al. (2011) conducted a small-scale in situ Raman spectroscopy study at Main Caves and RSA BUF1 and were able to identify white paintings from two panels at RSA BUF1 as calcite, with white paintings from Main caves being composed of both gypsum and calcite (Tour nié et al., 2011: 402). None of these earlier characterization studies were able to effectively isolate and remove contaminants from pigment samples. While research until 2011 had offered insights into the chemical and physical proper ties of paint used by Bushman ar tists, they were neither systematic nor extensive. Adelphine Bonneau, David Pearce and colleagues under took at this time to c haracter ize

pigments and improve their pretreatment, not only in South Africa, but in Botswana and Lesotho as well (Bonneau et al., 2011, 2012, 2014, 2017a). Using SEM-EDS in the Phuthiatsana Valley in Lesotho they identified three distinct white pigments in the four shelters from which samples were taken (ARAL 172, 175, 180 and 254: Bonneau et al., 2014). The first pigment comprised calcium (Ca), and sulphur (S) with small proportions of aluminium (Al), phosphorus (P) and silicon (Si) included from the rock face underneath the paintings. It was identified as gypsum using Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy analysis. The second pigment was calcite containing Ca with low concentrations of sodium (Na), potassium (K) Si and Al from the underlying rock, and the third paint variety was identified as white clay comprising Al, Si, iron (Fe), K and titanium (Ti) with Ca and S occurring naturally on the rock beneath. The implications of these analyses are particularly important because they confirm the earlier, small-scale findings of different and distinct recipes for white paint. Fur ther, that there is more than one homogenous white paint strongly suggests that some weathered faster than others (like Loubser suspected in 1991) which, importantly, contradicts the assertion that if white is present, the art must be recent (Mullen, 2018). Bonneau and colleagues’ direct dating results further destabilise this long-held belief.

AMS dating

The endeavours of Bonneau et al. led them to yet further discoveries. A bi-product of the pigment analysis project (Bonneau et. al, 2011, 2012, 2017b) was the identification of most black pigments as ‘carbon black’ – an incomplete organic carbon combustion process not only datable but also indicative of the date of paint production, unlike charcoal which only gives a terminus post quem. Crucially, images in close association with supposedly-recent SDFs were dated (the SDFs themselves having little-to-no black). At RSA LAB1 (also known at Storm Shelter), Blundell’s ’type site’ for the category of LH-SDF, two polychrome eland antelope with white pigment still visible (LAB1-2013-C3 and LAB1-2013C5) returned calibrated ages of 1585-1266 cal. BP and 2998-2381 cal. BP respectively (the latter the oldest date for any sample within the southern Maloti-Drakensberg at the time of writing: Bonneau et al., 2017a). Six images from RSA TYN2, also containing an SDF, have been dated, although only TYN2-C3 was sampled from an image with white pigment. This shaded polychrome eland produced a date of 2306-1754 cal BP (Bonneau et al., 2017b, 2017c). These associated dates, while not implying that all SDFs are necessarily pre-contact, do suggest that perhaps some of them are. What the dates do show, however, is that some white pigments can, and certainly do, preserve well over thousands of years.

Discussion

New pigment c haracter ization tec hniques, pretreatment and dating protocols, have improved our understanding of the nature of white paint, its varying composition and differential longevity. The suppositions of scholars such as Loubser and the early findings of Mazel a n d Wat c h m a n , n ow c o n f i r m e d by B o n n e a u a n d colleagues, together show that white pigment is by no means an indicator of young age. Some SDFs may be a product of interaction, but it is likely that Bushman artists have been painting large, detailed anthropomorphs for various reasons, for thousands of years.

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crossed views from southern africa

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