Narrating Biesje Poort: negotiating absence of storyline, vagueness and multivocality in the representation of Southern Kalahari rock engravings

Abstract

Rock engraving sites at Biesje Poort near Kakamas have been the focus of work by researchers and participants from the Kalahari. Narratives arising from this joint encounter with rock art and spatially associated artefacts, Later Stone Age and colonial in context, within this landscape and the contemporary socio-political setting, have highlighted issues of interpretive ambiguity and vagueness. There are marked gaps in the storyline, the different emerging accounts are often incommensurate, challenging efforts at constructing any single synthesis or representation. The material traces of the past in this landscape throw up the provocations of multivocality, but can be resources for engaging alternative narratives and the ways in which places, peoples and histories are constructed, inter alia by the heritage sector, in the present.

Keywords:

• Biesje Poort
• heritage discourse
• Kalahari
• ǂKhomani San
• multivocality
• rock art

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Morris

David Morris is affiliated to the Department of Archaeology, McGregor Museum, Kimberley. [email protected]