Milestones in the development of symbolic behaviour: a case study from Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa

Abstract

Wonderwerk Cave (Northern Cape Province, South Africa) is an example of a natural locality that, in the past as in the present, was imbued with meaning and symbolism. Today, local communities associate the cave with a snake spirit, while rock art adorning the cave walls attests to the special status of the cave during the Later Stone Age. In the terminal Acheulean (over 180,000 years ago), hominins introduced manuports with special sensory properties into the back of the cave, a locality with singular acoustic and visual qualities. Thus, the archaeological record of Wonderwerk Cave serves as a unique and extensive diachronic record of milestones in the development of symbolic behaviour. It provides evidence to support the position that elements of symbolic behaviour emerged long before the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa.

Keywords:

• Wonderwerk Cave
• Earlier Stone Age
• Later Stone Age
• Fauresmith
• archaeology of the senses
• symbolic behaviour

Acknowledgements

This project builds on the fieldwork carried out by Peter Beaumont. All fieldwork was carried out under permit from the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) and analysis of museum collections took place under the terms of a signed agreement between Michael Chazan and the McGregor Museum. We are grateful to the staff of the McGregor Museum, including Colin Fortune, Leon Jacobson, David Morris and Vincent Dinku, for all of their support, and to Neels Luhule, custodian of Wonderwerk Cave, for his assistance. ESEM photos were taken at Mt. Sinai Hospital, Toronto, with the assistance of Doug Holmyard. We also wish to thank: Hagai Ron (The Hebrew University) for allowing us to cite his unpublished paleomagnetic ages, H. Rüther and colleagues (University of Cape Town) for 3-D images used here, the Royal Ontario Museum for photographs of the slabs and Alexandra Sumner for lithic illustrations. Funding for this project was provided by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Michael Chazan

Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

[email protected]

Liora Kolska Horwitz

National Natural History Collections, Faculty of Life Sciences,

The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

[email protected]

Notes

1 The python plays a central role in the San creation myth, with humans descended from this snake. In the Tsodillo Hills, Botswana, the arid stream beds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills searching for water. In a small cave in this area, Coulson recently discovered a rock which was shaped like a python and covered with hundreds of indentations. ‘You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving’ (Sheila Coulson cited in ‘World's oldest ritual discovered: worshipped the python 70,000 years ago’, ScienceDaily (30 Nov. 2006)).