Kold Krush, A Cosmos Compressed: Mountain Subsistence and Spiritual Transformations in the Neoglacial of Maloti-Drakensberg, Southern Africa

Abstract ID: 3.13302 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

Sam Challis (1, 2)
Brian, Stewart (2, 1)

(1) University of The Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg 2050, South Africa
(2) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Categories: Anthropology, Archaeology, Culture, Paleoclimatology, Socio-Ecology
Keywords: Mountain ontology, Rock art dates, hunter-gatherer, New Animisms, Fishing

Categories: Anthropology, Archaeology, Culture, Paleoclimatology, Socio-Ecology
Keywords: Mountain ontology, Rock art dates, hunter-gatherer, New Animisms, Fishing

Abstract

Archaeologists have long sought to make excavated and rock art evidence mutually intelligible. The difficulty dating the latter, however, as well as the differences in the timescales to which each record speaks have continued to thwart most attempts to do so. In the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains of southeastern Africa, the analytical power of tying these records together was understood from the outset of systematic research there in the 1960s, but the means were not yet available. With new direct dates from rock paintings comes an unprecedented opportunity to relate the two registers, by employing excavated palaeoenvironmental, faunal and technological data, together with physical rock art images and the ethnographically-attested beliefs that inform them. From here we can infer the social and ideational ways in which hunter-gatherers saw the mountains and operated within them. Of particular interest is the neoglacial, the period between 3kya and 2kya during which it has recently been shown paintings were being made, but also when there were changes in ontological and epistemological strategy. Hunter gatherer cosmology, it seems, was ‘compressed’ in the mountains where hunting and fishing strategies combined to facilitate seasonal aggregation.