The devil’s in the detail: revisiting the ceiling panel at RSA CHI1, Kamberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

ABSTRACT

Recent work on a well-known San rock art panel from South Africa shows that continued movement between, on the one hand, San beliefs and rituals and, on the other, the images themselves allows us to move from general statements about San rock art to specific understandings. We demonstrate that continuing field research, combined with the revisiting of painted panels, is uncovering diverse ways in which San rock painters deployed and, at the same time, individually transmuted abstract ideas and experiences into material images, often in easily missed details. One of these instances, hitherto unknown, is described. By following-up the heuristic potential of this approach researchers are able to explore the ways in which San imagery played a social role at different times and in different places in San history.

RÉSUMÉ

Une étude récente en Afrique de Sud sur un panneau d'art rupestre San bien connu montre qu'un mouvement continuel entre, d’une côté, les croyances et rituels San, et de l'autre, les images elles-mêmes, nous permet de passer d’explications généralisantes à une compréhension spécifique de l’art pariétal San. Nous démontrons que la poursuite du travail de terrain, combinée à la revisite de panneaux peints, révèle les diverses façons selon lesquelles les peintres rupestres San ont déployé, et par la même, individuellement fait passer des idées abstraites et expériences dans les images matérielles. Ces idées et expériences sont souvent exprimées à travers des détails qui, dans certains cas, peuvent facilement passer inaperçus. Un de ces exemples, jusqu'alors inconnu, est décrit. En suivant le potentiel heuristique de cette approche, les chercheurs sont à même d’explorer les façons dont l’imagerie San jouait un rôle social à différentes époques et à différents endroits de l’histoire San.

KEYWORDS:

• San
• rock art
• South Africa
• ethnography
• polysemy
• social construction
• two-way traffic

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and three anonymous referees for their comments on this paper, as well as Stephen Townley Bassett for so meticulously recording the RSA CHI1 panel. His copy is in the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. We are especially grateful to Susan Ward, a valued and long-time supporter of the Rock Art Research Institute, who commissioned its making. We also thank Iris Guillemard for kindly translating our abstract into French.

Funding acknowledgement

Our work is supported by South African National Research Foundation (NRF) grants. Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the authors and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard. David Witelson expresses his gratitude to Susan Ward for her financial support.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The regions in which researchers have concurred include: the Maloti-Drakensberg (e.g. Wright and Mazel 2007); the Limpopo-Shashe confluence area (e.g. Eastwood and Eastwood 2006); North West Province (e.g. Ouzman 1996); Mpumalanga (Hampson et al. 2002); the southwestern and southeastern Cape (e.g. Yates et al. 1985: 79; Hollmann 2005; Mguni 2013); the Northern Cape Province (e.g. Deacon and Foster 2005; Morris 2017); Namibia (e.g. Kinahan 2018); Zimbabwe (e.g. Walker 1996; Mguni 2015); and Botswana (e.g. Walker 1997).

2 Importantly, we are not universalising ‘shamanism’. Indeed, ‘the concept of shamanism has always been an externally imposed construction, and does not exist anywhere at all other than in the minds of its students’ (Price 2001: 6, emphasis in the original). In elaborating this statement, Neil Price (2001: 6) pointed out that ‘as both a term and a notion, shamanism is entirely an academic creation, and as such is certainly a useful tool serving to describe a pattern of ritual behaviour and belief.’

3 It is the policy of the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI) at the University of the Witwatersrand to protect rock art sites not open to the public by withholding site names and locations. RSA CHI1 is the code for the site as indexed in RARI’s archives. The official site number (2929BC44) is on record at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

4 Although the eland itself is associated with water and rain-making, the images in the panel at RSA CHI1 depict no obvious rain-making activities or ‘rain-making scenes’ (Mazel 1982: 75–76; see also Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004b, Challis et al. 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. David Lewis-Williams

David Lewis-Williams is Professor Emeritus in the University of the Witwatersrand. In addition to southern African San rock art he has published on the Upper Palaeolithic art of Western Europe, Neolithic tombs and imagery, and religion. He is currently working on /Xam San mythology.

David G. Pearce

David Pearce is Associate Professor at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has conducted field research on rock art in several parts of southern Africa. He runs a research programme in the Maclear District of the Eastern Cape Province and specialises in the characterisation and direct dating of rock art pigments.

David M. Witelson

David Witelson is a doctoral candidate at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. He has published in the fields of rock art research and lithic analysis. His current research explores the applicability of performance theory to the rock art of the Wodehouse District in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.

Sam Challis

Sam Challis is Head of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. Working towards better understandings of the San idiom as expressed in rock art, he also specialises in the art of contact. He runs a multidisciplinary community-based research programme in the mountains of Matatiele, Eastern Cape Province.