Frogs or people: Dorothea Bleek and a genealogy of ideas in rock art research

ABSTRACT

Social status and experience both play a role in the history of rock art research. The weight of such influence has led to the questionable identification of certain images. Following her belief that much San (Bushman) rock art illustrated myths, Dorothea Bleek suggested that two copies made by Helen Tongue depict /Xam San narratives concerning the ‘New Maiden and the Rain’. Bleek argued that they show people transformed, or transforming, into frogs. More recent research shows that Tongue’s copies refer not to mythical narratives of humans transforming into frogs, but to the central religious ritual of San life.

RÉSUMÉ

Le statut social et l'expertise des chercheurs jouent tous deux un rôle dans l'histoire de la recherche en art pariétal. Le poids de telles influences a eu pour résultat des interprétations d'images qui sont à présent remises en question. Dans l'idée que l'art pariétal San (Bushman) illustre des mythes, Dorothea Bleek proposa que deux copies faites par Helen Tongue représentaient la narration d'une histoire San /Xam à propos de ‘la Jeune Fille et la Pluie’. Bleek suggéra qu'elles montraient des gens transformés, ou se transformant, en grenouilles. Des recherches plus récentes montrent cependant que les copies de Tongue se réfèrent non pas à des narrations mythiques d'humains se transformant en grenouilles, mais plutôt à une composante centrale de la vie religieuse San.

KEYWORDS:

• San rock art
• Dorothea Bleek
• Helen Tongue
• !khwa
• frogs

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Mark McGranaghan for allowing me to use his unpublished transcription of the Bleek and Lloyd manuscripts, alerting me to the image at Melkhoutboom and discussing with me frogs and water creatures. Sam Challis kindly allowed me to use the Kenegha Poort photograph. David Lewis-Williams brought Tongue’s copies to my attention. I am grateful to Jill Weintroub for answering my questions about Bleek and Tongue and for sharing with me a chapter from her book when it was still in press. I thank David Lewis-Williams and Mark McGranaghan, as well as two anonymous referees, for their constructive criticism and comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes on contributor

David Witelson is an MSc candidate under the supervision of Prof. David Pearce at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. His interests include the archaeology and rock art of the Later Stone Age of southern Africa.

ORCID

David Witelson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6575-0986

Notes

1 The notebooks compiled by Bleek and Lloyd, a total of some 12,000 manuscript pages of handwritten late nineteenth-century /Xam phonetic script with verbatim transcripts in English are available online at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/. References to pages in the notebooks take the form, for example, L.VIII.16.7431. The first letter denotes either Wilhelm Bleek (W) or Lucy Lloyd (L), the Roman numerals denote the informant’s numerical assignation, the first Arabic number the number of the notebook and the second Arabic number the page number/s.

Additional information

Funding

This work benefitted from the support of the National Research Foundation (NRF) under a Scarce Skills Development Fund Master’s Scholarship. The financial assistance of the NRF towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF.