ââ‹which of the Following Is Not a Common Depiction of Bushmen Rock Art?
The ethnic San communities of southern Africa were originally hunting and gathering peoples. One of the greatest testaments to San history is the rock fine art found throughout the subcontinent.
The oldest stone art in southern Africa is around xxx,000 years old and is found on painted rock slabs from the Apollo 11 rock shelter in Namibia. Where our report took place – the Maloti-Drakensberg mountain massif of Due south Africa and Kingdom of lesotho – rock paintings were fabricated from most 3,000 years ago right into the 1800s.
For decades, people idea that one guess nigh the art'south meaning was as good as another. Nevertheless, this ignored the San themselves.
We can deepen our understanding if we try to view rock art in terms of San shamanistic beliefs and experiences. Advances in ethnography (literature produced by anthropologists who work with San people) assist convey San worldview to rock fine art researchers.
Past locating new sites – thousands are however to be establish – and revisiting known ones in the calorie-free of developing insights, we can go much further than guessing.
New insights from quondam images
We re-investigated such a site in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains. Information technology was outset described in the 1950s and is recorded as RSA CHI1. At commencement glance, the ceiling panel seems a confusing drove of paintings of antelopes and human figures, some of which are painted on pinnacle of others, in shades of earthy reds, yellow ochres and white.
In 2009 and working under challenging circumstances, South African creative person and author Stephen Townley Bassett produced a documentary copy of the ceiling console. It shows the art's beauty and mystery.
When we looked at his copy, we institute that the significance of some images on the site'south ceiling panel had been missed by other researchers. This allowed usa to examine the meaning of these images more closely.
Importantly, our realisation was not a technological or methodological advance. Instead, it was a conceptual development that occurred by turning our attention to a well-known site and viewing it again in the light of everything we accept learned and so far about San rock art.
Our re-investigation allowed us to arrive at a new agreement of specific elements of San belief.
Deeply religious fine art
Two sources of San ethnography are peculiarly important in rock fine art research and our understanding of the ceiling panel. In the 1870s, the German language linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his co-worker and sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd interviewed a series of |Xam San people, some of whom had been brought from the Northern Cape to Cape Town equally convicts.
Remarkably, Bleek and Lloyd recorded over 12,000 pages of texts in the |Xam linguistic communication, which is no longer spoken, and transliterated nigh of it line-by-line into English. Much of this material remains relevant to our understanding of the art.
More than recently, in the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists worked with San groups in Namibia and Botswana with a focus on a range of topics from hunting and gathering to sociology and childcare. The Kalahari ethnography compliments the Bleek and Lloyd archive.
We know from the ethnography that the San believe in a universe with spiritual realms to a higher place and beneath the level on which people alive. Decades of research has shown that the rock art is securely religious and situated conceptually in the same multilevel universe.
Re-reading the ceiling
In San stone art, the eland is a connecting element. It is the nearly commonly depicted antelope in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg paintings. It features in several San rituals and was believed to be the animate being with the near !gi: – the |Xam give-and-take for the invisible essence that lies at the heart of San belief and ritual.
At RSA CHI1, there are many depictions of eland, just we focused on the one with its head sharply raised.
Depictions of this posture, though not common, recur in other sites. The eland'southward raised caput suggests that it is smelling something, near probably rain. Both odour and pelting are supernaturally powerful in San idea.
The unique feature in this paintings is, notwithstanding, the way in which a line runs upwardly from an expanse of rough rock, breaking at the eland'southward forepart legs, so on to another expanse of rough rock. The painter, or painters, must have depicted the eland first and so added the line to develop the significance of its raised head. We contend that both the raised head and the line emphasise contact with the spirit realm, though in different ways.
The way in which the painted line emerges from and continues into areas of rough rock is comparable to the way in which numerous San images were painted to give the impression that they are entering and leaving the stone face up via cracks, steps and other inequalities. But what lay backside the rock face?
Backside the stone face
We have noted already that the San universe is divided into different realms. Contact between these often interacting realms is sometimes depicted in the art by long lines that link images or sometimes appear to pass through the rock face. San shamans or medicine people (called !gi:ten in |Xam) move along or climb these 'threads of calorie-free' as they journey between realms to heal the sick, make rain and perform other tasks. The |Xam called these out-of-body journeys |xãũ. They obtained the power needed to accomplish them by summoning potency from strong things, such equally the eland.
The inter-realm nature of the line is further evidenced by the three creatures depicted moving forth it. The two moving upward are quadrupeds or four-legged animals: 1 is not-specifc and one has a tail and human arms. These images may draw the sort of bodily changes that !gi:ten say they experience during out-of-trunk journeys.
The faint white creature moving downward the line was for us the climax of our work. It is clearly birdlike (!gi:10 oftentimes speak of flight). But closer inspection revealed that, though faint, it has a rhebok antelope caput with two straight black horns, a black nose and mouth.
Information technology also has two 'wings' emanating from its shoulders. In short, it is a hybrid form – part bird and part buck. In addition, it has ii white lines coming out of the back of its neck. It was from this spot that !gi:x expelled the sickness that they drew out of the bodies of sick people.
For many people, the detail and the complexity of the images at this site come every bit a surprise. Yet they are typical. San rock art ranks among the best in the world if we consider its beauty, its intricacy and the rich sources of explanation on which we can depict.
Source: https://theconversation.com/an-ancient-san-rock-art-mural-in-south-africa-reveals-new-meaning-157177
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