Assigned Session: FS 3.172: Speaking stones: The archaeology and anthropology of rock art in high mountain environments
Session w/o abstracts
Abstract ID: 3.8033 | Pending | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA
David Witelson (0)
David Witelson (1)
1
(1) University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand | Private Bag X3 | Wits 2050 | Braamfontein, Johannesburg | Gauteng | South Africa
Rock paintings abound in the mountainous Maloti-Drakensberg region of South Africa and Lesotho. For thousands of years, and until late into the colonial era, these mountains were home to Indigenous San communities who traditionally lived by hunting and gathering. They also lived in a world of images. Their image-making performances belonged to a suite of interrelated performances concerning mediations in rites of passage, ritual control of rain and animals, and contact with the spirit world. For them, the surrounding mountains, rivers and grasslands contained portals to the upper and lower spirit realms. It was a world with two maps: a physical terrain overlaid with a conceptual cultural landscape. The abundant rock art imagery can not only be described but can also be empirically explained with reference to rich painted details and mutually illuminating ethno-historical sources. They allow us to move beyond impositions of the Western worldview. Elements of the imagery, and the landscape in which that imagery was made, are explicable in terms of what San communities themselves thought about the world in which they lived.
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