Review Article

Probing deep into rock art

Siyakha Mguni
Rock Art Research Institute
University of the Witwatersrand
South Africa (Email: siyakha@rockart.wits.ac.za)

There has never been such a prolific output of books about rock art in southern Africa, both academic and popular, as in the past few years. This review discusses two recent illustrious volumes. The first, Deciphering ancient minds, probes further into San minds, described by the authors as their "now lost thought-world." The book contains 9 chapters, with illustrations comprising early copies made of the rock art, line drawings, photographs and maps. The second, Seeing and knowing, is the result of an April 2000 symposium celebrating David Lewis-Williams' lifetime contribution to rock art research. This edited volume covers various manifestations of rock art and time-scales, analysed using theoretical and methodological perspectives designed for those regions with, and those without, ethnographic correlates. Its 17 essays are richly illustrated with monochrome images, photographs, maps and tables. End notes, an expanded bibliography and a meticulous index in the first book, and a compendium of Lewis-Williams' published works in the second, are welcome additions. The first book, in hardback, is very reasonably priced and will appeal to specialists and enthusiasts alike. The second is intended for an academic audience and so may not be an easy read for the casual reader, its price clearly not student-friendly.

Deciphering ancient minds is a definitive discourse on San art and spirituality that examines textual and pictorial cues from their cultural vestiges. In the true spirit of the dual ethnographic-neuropsychological perspective (labelled the 'classic approach' in the second book), each of the chapters unfolds through multifaceted and nuanced engagements with key texts from San ethnographies and contemporary historical records. Lingering enigmas about the San and their art are systematically debunked in pursuit of clarification. The book shakes off the "debilitating misunderstandings" of established Western academic opinion, which promoted a view of small-scale societies as feeble-minded primitive savages, emphasising instead San social and cognitive complexity. However, this prejudice stills exists today, albeit in a veiled form: personally I recall, two years ago, being introduced to an audience as a San art specialist. One gentleman in the room declared that all the San art he had seen was no more than what his nine-year-old daughter could paint on a lazy afternoon. It was a joke, he later assured me! In reality this is the old notion that San images are insipid stick figures produced by idle infantile hunters. Thus, in some milieus San art is perceived as rudimentary, as small children's drawings; closer to the undeveloped beginnings of this human aptitude than to supposed modern high art (see, for example, Willcox 1964: 58). To enlighten the reader, Lewis-Williams and Sam Challis use nineteenth-century San commentaries on old San images, copied by George W. Stow, to present a humanising perspective of this ancient art's sophistication and associated customary ritual practice.

The authors retraced (in both senses of the word) some of the sites whose copied images were remarked upon by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd's San informants. In the process, they found discrepancies between the imagery visible at the sites and Stow's copies. These discrepancies were the origin of flawed earlier rock art readings. Their methodology bridges the fluid interstices between these images, the texts embedded in San myth and testimonies and their English translations. The premise is that ancient San texts can reveal the underlying meanings of images. As the authors contend, "The older images are thus an extension to the texts." The book's key cornerstones are the distinct correlations between the identification of copied images by San informants and a specific recurrence of notions of 'sorcery' (English translation), rain-making and myths as aspects of San religious life and cosmology. The book follows this fecund interpretive seam to make new connexions between images, texts and myths in order to understand the symbolism of certain hitherto lesser known San art themes. Developing these newer understandings in later chapters, San landscape concepts of waterholes, valleys and precipices, high peaks, mists and weather phenomena are presented to explain the role of myth in San belief and ritual, cosmology and rock art. The discourse is a worked out example of how mythology and rock art converge to reveal nuanced understandings of San worldview without the latter being an illustration of the former.

The analogical thread running through the book is the Rosetta Stone's three registers, the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script and ancient Greek translation: together, these allied scripts, essentially conveying the same content, permitted the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and so led to our modern understanding of ancient Egypt. This is a pervasively powerful analogy: yet, the San texts examined (at times with inadequately informed translations) and the mass of ancient images are arguably not comparable to the close-fit shown by the key elements in the Rosetta Stone. Though an admirable analogy, can this approach be extended to other far-flung traditions, regions and times?

The central but challenging matter of space and time in rock art studies is pursued in Seeing and knowing. To all intents and purposes, this book extends the broader project on 'informed' and 'formal' methods set forth in an earlier volume, The archaeology of rock-art (Chippindale & Taçon 1998). In both, the geographical scope is intercontinental. Seeing and knowing emphasises the extent of the utility of the 'classic approach "in space and in time from the specific source," i.e. a region such as the one considered in Deciphering ancient minds. This classic methodology flourished after Lewis-Williams and a few contemporaries, working primarily in South Africa's south-eastern mountains, turned to social anthropological theory for answers to the meaning of San art. Although some have criticised this approach as being insensitive to temporal change, and hence ahistorical, the contributors show its value by bringing together an array of essays reflecting on its application in various regions of the world. The studies range from single-site analyses to those that consider regional clusters. A multiplicity of approaches anchored in contemporary social theory and analytical techniques, some with an historiographical angle, is employed, chronicling specific standpoints that over the years inspired 'informed' approaches in widely dispersed areas such as southern Africa, Western Europe, Australia and North America (Chapters 1, 12, 14 and 16). But the distinction between 'formal' and 'informed' methods is superficial as most studies actually employ them both and in tandem. Various papers also highlight issues of consistency and discontinuity as aspects of ethnographic-analogical applications in different regions (Chapter 5, 6 and 7). While in South Africa the Limpopo region shows, from multiple-layered site histories, that several traditions with subtle continuities in specific motifs (loincloths and aprons) existed across diverse cultural entities, the Tanzanian case shows that change occurred within a single cultural entity, from one form of expression (older, on rock faces) to another (newer, on portable wooden objects). Such continuities can be elicited not only in studies focused on intra-culture art production but also in studies that examine how the present communities (who may not be descendent from the ancient populations who made the rock art) value ancient art in their localities (Chapters 13 and 15). In this way, researchers are able to better understand temporal and cognitive change in specific landscapes.

The majority of the essays are largely iconographic and empirical, not empiricist, studies of various rock art themes. A classic example in this regard is the study of painting sequences in South America (Chapter 9) where precise recording resulted in the exposure of otherwise concealed aspects of panels, specifically the relationship of the imagery with the rock facets. Some chapters (3, 4 and 10) take the ideals of precise observation and recording further and employ a landscape perspective on a micro-scale to emphasise the relationship between the engraved images, their formal inter-relationships and the supporting substrates at specific sites. Using available ethnography (not necessarily relevant in all cases), the authors find links between their interpretations of the images at sites which are often located near water and ethnographic correlates suggesting continuity with ancient beliefs and practices. Key among these are rain-making, rites of passage and fertility in the two southern African cases, while in the North European cases, the underworld, water and a multi-layered cosmology are particularly emphasised. As they deal with the supernatural aspects in their analyses these writers avoid terminologies such as 'shaman' or 'shamanistic'.

While some contributors avoid mentioning 'shaman' or 'shamanistic,' others advocate using these terms as they are already in widespread use and moreover — as the shamanistic complex exists alongside many other forms of spiritual expression — this system of belief need not be perceived as monolithic and fixed in space and time (Chapter 17). Some researchers in southern Africa, Europe and North America have therefore boldly couched their interpretations in this magico-religious perspective, focusing on themes around transformation, supernatural travel, vision questing and allied mental imagery, or in some case studies love magic associated with animals that are imbued with power such as the elk (Chapters 2, 7, 8, 11 and 16). In one study, in South Africa, a hitherto little-known aspect of San art astral imagery (comets, meteors and meteorites) is linked with the trance dance, flight and transformation, thus placing it "unambiguously in shamanic context." However, a point in this paper that illustrates that caution is needed when following the classic approach is that there exists a potential for multiple ethnographic textual readings. For instance, in the original text of a Ju/'hoan myth, Ga!ra (also named Kaoxa) calls upon 'lightning' to kill the lions that had caused harm to his sons. In the paper, this passage is read as 'loosing a meteorite'. It is a reality of informed methods which, by the nature of ethnographic analogues, intrinsically involves bridging pasts and presents using the incidence of formal or textual convergences. Where none such exists, there can be no ethnographic analogue.

When parallels miscarry, the interpretive project weakens. Is the book successful in delivering methods that depend less on the use(s) of these analogues? As Deciphering ancient minds shows, Lewis-Williams' work is informed more by the emic than the formal approach. Even where he has moved far beyond the ethnographic and geographic boundaries of San art to other spaces and times, such as in his recent decades' work in East Africa and Europe, he has formulated bridging methods that permit the use of ethnographic parallels. Could this be a signal that the formal approach is not fully adequate?

References

• CHIPPINDALE, C. & P.S. TAÇON (ed.). 1998. The archaeology of rock-art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• WILLCOX, A.R. 1964. The non-representational petroglyphs of South Africa. South Africa Journal of Science, 60: 55–8.