M.Sc. Rock Art Studies (by research) in the Rock Art Research Institute, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies (GAES), Faculty of Science University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, 2016. / Northern Sotho, Khoekhoe, and San rock art occur together in many shelters across South Africa’s Limpopo province. In some cases, specimens of the rock art of these traditions can be seen to be painted directly over one another. By studying such occurrences on the Makgabeng plateau, this project assesses whether the superimposition of rock art among different painting traditions can reveal new insights regarding the painters and their relationships with ‘others’. By looking at how the social life of the rock art is manipulated through superimposition, this study aims to uncover how this manner of consumption reflects upon the nature of the interaction among people of different painting traditions. / LG2017

University of the Witwatersrand Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Master of Science (Archaeology) by research. Rock Art Research Institute; School of Geography, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies. Johannesburg, 2017. / Southern Africa’s Orange River has been a frontier-zone for centuries, acting as a socially formative and often volatile expression of its surrounds. Communities of the region have competed, compounded, and admixed for as long as competing influences have obliged it, contributing over hundreds of years to a background milieu of generally-coherent beliefs and practices; ‘frontier ideologies’ that dealt in the expression and mediation of identity, and the configuration of responses to tumultuous social and ecological conditions. The common core of these ideologies allowed frontier societies to respond to one another in familiar terms, even if other channels of meaning were inaccessible. One of the contributors to these ideologies were the |Xam, most well-known for their contributions to the shamanistic approach to interpretation of rock art in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of South Africa. While analogy has allowed them to speak on behalf of the artists of this disparate tradition, they are products of the area surrounding the Orange River during the nineteenth century. Accordingly, they demonstrate the fundamental features of a frontier society; they evaluate contact with other communities relative to themselves, and formulate appropriate expressions of identity to enact in response. The application of their ethnography is somewhat burdened by their application to the rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg, however, which casts their motivations in specific, ritualised terms. This thesis considers a very different body of rock art to the one conventionally interpreted by the shamanistic approach, but located in a historical and regional context intimately linked to the |Xam informants; specifically, the rock art of the Strandberg hills, in the Northern Cape province, South Africa. This body of art is one dominated by horses, distributed as a structure that spans much of the site, and manufactured with visibility in mind. This thesis finds that these images were products of the frontier ideologies that inhabited the region, and the adaptive practices that emerge from them. Accordingly, the art is characterised as a record of inhabitation, an expression of identity, and the mediation of contact with a changing landscape, in keeping with the behaviours that had marked interactions between communities in the region for long before many of the images were placed on the Strandberg. / MT 2017

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Johannesburg, 1996 / South African and American public rock art sites are in a predicament. In both countries, there is a lack of an adequate, theoretically informed but practically implementable, conceptual approach to presenting these sites. This lack leads to the reproduction of stereotypes of rock art and the indigenous people who made it. This thesis suggests a way of rectifying the present situation. It is argued that any suggested reconstruction of public rock art sites must recognise that they are implicated in identity-formation. Following this premise, a strategy, entitled metaphoric pilgrimage, is suggested, developed and applied to four rock art sites - two in South Africa and two in America.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. October 2015. / A call for a more systematic approach to site protection and management has long been made for rock art conservation in South Africa. This study heeds the call as it aims to develop a conservation model for rock art in South Africa from a management perspective. Site protection and management principles that have been successfully implemented in Australia and America have seldom been implemented in South Africa. Conservation researchers argue that it is relatively easy to identify theoretically the requirements of a management or conservation policy; however, developing a conservation model and policy that will successfully maximize the conservation opportunities is an abstract task. As such building a conservation model founded on abstract concepts on conservation would not lead to an improved conservation practice and would be unsuccessful. In world heritage systems there are, however, essential agreed upon principles on assessment, criteria, guidelines, standards, and implementation. Such systems therefore, underscore that the problem is perhaps not with theory but with conservation practice in South Africa. This study presents new and original research on rock art conservation interventions assessment on rock art. As a point of departure this study investigated the history of conservation practice in South Africa using a conservation assessment model developed by Kathleen Dardes (1998) for museums in America. The history on conservation practice has identified inconsistencies in the management of conservation treatments and approaches to interventions. Conservation interventions are still based on inductive, emergency salvage approaches with no thorough understanding of either site or environmental conditions in South Africa. There is little attention paid to indigenous sensitivities with conservation practices and there are no standard systems of monitoring and reporting. While far more data is required to provide definitive conservation strategies, this study proposes a three step conservation model for rock art in South Africa from a management perspective. This model focuses on initiating, planning and controlling conservation projects.

From Introduction: The study of San rock art has undergone several different phases in approach to the interpretation of art. Two approaches are currently in use. The first emphasises the art as narrative or literal representations of San life and its proponents may be called the "art for art's sake" school. Adherents to the second approach make detailed use of the San ethnography on the belief system of these people and are highly critical of the literalists because they provide no such context. The second approach has rapidly gained ascendancy and replaced the "art for art's sake" school over the last twenty years. The watershed came with the researches of Vinnicombe (1967) in the southern Drakensberg and Maggs (1967) in the Western Cape who both embarked upon programs of research which had quantification and numerical analysis at their core, so that they could present "...some objective observations on a given sample of rock paintings in a particular area..." in order to compare and contrast paintings from geographically different areas. What Vinnicombe's numerical analyses clearly showed was that the eland was the most frequently depicted antelope and that it must have played a fundamental role "...in both the economy and the rellgious beliefs of the painters...", which opened up the search for what those beliefs might be and how they could be related to the rock art itself. In order to understand what the rock art was all about it was recognised that researchers had to meaningfully contextualise the art within the social and religious framework of the artists themselves. Without the provision of such a relevant context, as many different interpretations of the paintings could be made as there were people with imaginations. Such a piecemeal approach provides a meaningless jumble of subjective fancy which tells us something about the interpreters but nothing about the rock art. It is unfortunate that the advent of this explicitly social and anthropological approach marks the end of the amateur as a serious interpreter of San rock art, for the juxtaposition of the ethnography with the rock art requires a proper training in which the intricacies of symbol and metaphor can be recognised.

The majestic mountains of the uKhahlamba Drakensberg, formed many millennia ago were home to the Bushmen[footnote 1] or San people. They lived at these mountains for thousands of years before they were colonised by the Bantu speakers and the Europeans. Academic writings for many years have perpetuated the thinking that Bushman people were largely extinct. The dominance of this view in the academic writings was encouraged by historical evidence that Europeans and Bantu speakers hunted and killed Bushmen over the last several centuries. Researchers argue that the extermination of the Bushmen was because they were less human in the eyes of the foreigners, due to cattle raiding. There is still some element of this thinking amongst today’s academics, although research in the last decade is questioning this thinking. The question of whether descendants do exist is relevant to issues of rights of access to ancestral sacred sites, in particular rock art sites. At present, access to rock art sites is granted on qualification as an authentic fee-paying tourist (or affordability) rather than on group rights to a cultural heritage resource (cultural rights). Based on this, I argue that access to rock art sites is based on qualification rather than by right. This is largely driven by an approach that emphasises the physical conservation and financial sustainability of a site, rather than its spiritual maintenance. It has become clear that the interests in rock art by tourists and Bushman descendants are distinct from each other. Tourists have an aesthetic significance for rock art while Bushmen descendants have a spiritual significance for the paintings. Beyond any doubt, the physically based and financially driven approach has brought new challenges to today’s Bushmen descendants, whom in reaffirming their identities now have a new challenge to overcome. Not only are the rock art sites physically threatened but also they have lost much of their spiritual powers. Their fate lies in the hands of heritage officers who must determine access rights to the painted shelters. Both the National Heritage Resources Act and the KwaZulu-Natal Heritage Act acknowledge living heritage. However, the existence of this heritage is judged against the physical approach to rock art management. If the practises of descendants are perceived to be a threat to the rock art, they will not be approved. The case of the Duma is a classic example. Prior to the ritual ceremony at Game Pass Shelter, Kamberg, they were informed of the minimum standards for opening a rock art site to public and rules of how people should behave while visiting painted shelters. While it was evident that there are problems with the two approaches, the spiritual and physical approach, discussed in the thesis, it is important that solutions are identified. I do not believe that one approach on its own will be good enough, for reasons discussed in the thesis. Instead, the two approaches should be implemented together to compliment each other by identifying common grounds. I provide strategies as to how I believe that such a common ground can be reached. In addition, I provide my own analytical thinking as to how these strategies can be achieved. There is no general consensus over which term is appropriate. Both terms are considered by some academics to be derogatory or pejorative (Chennels 2003). San means vagabond and was given to the Bushmen by Khoi-Khoi people, because they considered themselves of a better social class, as they had domesticated animals and were more sedentary than Bushmen. However, according to WIMSA (Thoma 2003) the word San is derived from the Hai||om language meaning “people who gather”. It is normally written Saan but it has been accepted to write San. In 1993 the San requested to be called San when referred to as an entire group. If one refers to individual people/groups they like to be called by their language and cultural name i.e. Khwe, !Kung, !Xun, Ju|’hoansi, ‡Khomani, N|u, |’Auni, Hai||om, etc In this thesis, Bushmen is a preferred term, because it is a better-known term among the people who are central to this study. It is used without any insulting connotations attached to the term.