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of Rock Art (SAMORA), situated at the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand. SAMORA “is the world’s largest rock art museum and is considered to be the welcome centre for visitors preparing to tour rock art sites in the country” (Ndlovu, 2012:284; Mguni 2002). These centres receive few visitors per month, highlighting the fact that rock art tourism has not reached its potential in the country (Ndlovu, 2012). Their very construction, however, affirms a positive transformation in perceptions of rock art as described below.
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Wildebeest Kuil became a place of interest for its other points of archaeological richness.
Stone circles and clearings around the hill, containing evidence of Later Stone Age (LSA) activity noted by geologist and ethnologist George Stow who made the first record of engravings at Wildebeest Kuil in the early 1870s, were of interest to archaeologists such as Peter Beaumont who found LSA lithics when excavating near the crest of the hill in 1983 (Morris 2012; Beaumont & Vogel 1989). J.H. Power found a pressure-flaked, barbed and tanged stone arrowhead on the hill, an artefact now interpreted as a stone skeuomorph of iron origins, a product “of a more complex social landscape at that period in the subcontinent”
(Morris, 2012:231; Mitchell 2002; Burkitt 1928). Ruins and middens linked with twentieth- century farm workers as well as the Kimberley diamond rush occur on the fringes of the hill and continue to attract archaeological attention.
Rock art research in the 1960s took a different turn from the previous valuation of the art—in terms of style, sequence, aesthetics and documentation of the past—seeking rather to find the meaning behind rock art images (Lewis-Williams 1981, 1972; Vinnicombe 1976). Studying the art through nineteenth and twentieth-century San ethnography showed that both ambiguity and polysemy “ran through myth, ritual and art” and that both the mythology and art shared symbols and metaphors (Dowson, 1994:332). This gave rise to interpretations of the rock art as based on a theory of shamanism, proposed by the South African scholar David Lewis-Williams (1981), which holds that the San artists of old were shamans (spirit mediums/priests), who saw images while in a state of trance and who, once they emerged from these trances, went on to reproduce those images on cave walls (Lewis-Williams &
Pearce 2004; Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989; Lewis-Williams 1981). This theory has impacted interpretations of rock art the world over.
The 1990s saw the emergence of rock art research—once largely the preserve of amateur enthusiasts—as an important contributor to “discussions of epistemological and ethical issues in archaeology”; also becoming a primary focus of undergraduate and postgraduate curricula (Dowson, 2007:49). A debate emerged in this time that centred on the appropriateness of interpretations of rock art as based on Lewis-Williams’ theory (ibid). Feminist and context- specific readings of the art have emerged in opposition to the shamanism model (cf. Solomon
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1999, 1997, 1995; McCall 2007). Others have suggested that the Bleek and Lloyd archive42
“has been understood in a very limited way as a system of linguistic and cultural documentation and which has been mined for a lost, extinct authenticity” imbibed from notions of cultural salvage and creating “a kind of cult out of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd” (Rassool, 2010:93; cf. Bank 2006). Nevertheless, Bleek and Lloyd maintain pride of place in the historiography of San peoples and the theory of shamanism remains central to the way in which rock art is interpreted today.
Currently, the tourism centre at Wildebeest Kuil offers a perspective on the site based on aspects of earlier archaeological finds as well as an interpretation of the engravings “broadly acknowledging a shamanistic context” and the importance of cultural landscapes (Morris, 2012:232; 2003, 2002; Taçon & Ouzman 2004). Given a shamanistic interpretation, the engravings may relate to beliefs about the rain and rain-making especially since they are situated at a vantage point from where the nearby pan can be seen (Morris, 2004). Dowson cites records which show that “Bushman shamans [in the south-eastern mountains and adjoining areas of the sub-continent] made rain not just for their own people but also for their agropastoralist neighbours and were, at least sometimes, rewarded by being given cattle or a portion of the farmers’ crops” (Dowson, 1994:334; cf. Prins 1990; Stanford 1910; Hook 1908). Most research on the rock art of the period of contact between San and Bantu- speaking groups “has maintained an exclusive emphasis on Bushman ethnography and has thus interpreted the images from a Bushman perspective only” (Dowson, 1994:333). Dowson cites Thackeray (1985; 1988) as the only exception to this. According to Dowson (1994:342):
…[i]f the long-accepted colonial histories of southern Africa are to be righted, as indeed they must be, the process of reconstruction would do well to begin with the subcontinent’s rock art that, in its imagery, production, consumption and negotiation of power relations, implicated the subcontinent’s various communities.
Dowson’s argument speaks to the ‘unity in diversity’ that was present in San rock art from
“from the beginning of the seventeenth century, or earlier” (1994:341). This is a possibility
42 Lewis-William’s theory relied heavily on the work of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (1911) (cf. Wessels 2008; Bank 2006; Bleek, 1929). In 1870 the library curator, Wilhelm Bleek, persuaded the new governor of the Cape, Philip Wodehouse, to allow him guardianship over a few San prisoners who he received into his home as servants. Bleek and Lloyd spent the next few years “recording thousands of pages of folklore, mythology, and other texts from a succession of /Xam informants” (Barnard, 1992:79).
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that is overlooked in the argument that San cultural resources have been taken up as a unifying factor due to the widespread belief that there are no direct descendents to lay claim to the heritage resources in use (proponents of this argument include Ndlovu 2012, 2005 and Jeursen 1995). Nevertheless, the argument does have its merits, especially when considered in respect to the denigration of San peoples in history. Rock art images have been widely appropriated, adorning wine bottles and directions to restroom facilities (cf. Ndlovu 2012;
Dowson 1996). I have seen a large mural depicting archetypal San imagery painted on a wall leading to the rest rooms at a popular rest stop and eatery in the Northern Cape as well as San imagery as directions to restroom facilities at a Kalahari lodge. The exploitation of San heritage coupled with a lack of cultural sensitivity is deeply embedded in cultural stereotypes propagated in South Africa and abroad (cf. Buntman 2002, 1996; Blundell 1998; Dowson 1996; Tomaselli 1995). Groups from around the world that have been similarly exploited include the Innu of Canada and the Indonesian Papuans (Ndlovu 2012; Monbiot 2006).
At Wildebeest Kuil today, significance is placed on meaning and the rock art’s embeddedness in the socio-political milieu of the past and the present (Morris, 2012). Wildebeest Kuil is recognised as an archaeological site of cultural and historic significance. Morris argues that whereas Wilman in another era “sought to take the art to the people” by removing selected engravings for museum display (a disputable notion based on imperial acquisition), the aim at Wildebeest Kuil today is to “take people to the art”43 (2012:232). The view of the engravings in their surviving material setting together with “fragments of regional histories” and contemporary politics is intended to add “vastly to the interest of the experience, while also complicating or destabilising the narrative” (ibid). The engravings are no longer judged against those at other sites, and in terms of style and aesthetics. In addition, Wilman’s placement of the rock art in a museum space offered viewership to a privileged few (in an era of canonical imperialism) while Wildebeest Kuil now aims to open the site to the wider public. From the above it is clear that heritage is made meaningful over time and multiple layers of meaning intersect at sites of importance. Moreover, the perceived value of sites has shifted in congruence with changing terms of valuation of rock art especially since its inclusion into the academy.
43 This is possible at Wildebeest Kuil because of the relative ease of access to the site (it is situated on a main road, just outside Kimberley).
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