A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2014. / This thesis presents data collected during the 2012 and 2013 recording of painted sheep imagery from five painted rock shelters in the northern Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Through studying the micro- and macro-context of these paintings, I try to understand their presence in the rock art here. Paintings of sheep are believed to have been made by San hunter-gatherers and thought to be relatively old. Using multiple strands of evidence from the rock art, the excavated record, ethnographies, and drawing on human-animal theory, I explore when the sheep were painted, whose sheep were painted and for what reason.

From Thesis: Why the animal as our point of departure in this discussion of prehistoric art, and why as a sacred symbol? Prehistoric art stretched over an immensely long period, from the first evidence of the activities of Neanderthal tribes during the Mousterian period, ± 35,000 B.C., to the end of the Magdalenian, ± 8,000 B.C. We are dealing with a time-span of nearly 30,000 years, during which a strictly Zoomorphic attitude existed. The animal was the dominant feature. It was constantly used in the decoration of cave walls, on engraved stone slabs, and on all kinds of utilitarian objects.

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.

Thesis (M.A. (Anthropology)) - Rhodes University, 2005.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Johannesburg, January 2013 / Certain postures and gestures of the human body recur in fine-line San rock art. Students of southern African rock art are introduced to a number of classic postures and features of human figures during the trance dance. The movement and posture of the human body is significant during the ritual trance dance, yet the reasons for painting certain postures over and over again have not been discussed often. This dissertation examines the symbolic meaning behind painting certain recurring postures in the Maclear and Barkly East Districts of the north Eastern Cape Province. This thesis examines sets of similar pointing and gesturing postures of the human body in rock art, and also examines the symbolic role of recurring postures in both the ritual trance dance and rock art. I argue that the painters used these similar sets of images (and others) in rock art to actively maintain and negotiate the flow of supernatural potency from the spirit world into the body of the shaman to utilise in this world and that the images were not static depictions of fragments of the trance dance, and did not only represent the process, but were viewed as actively participating in this process.

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

This dissertation explores the emergence of figuration in prehistoric China. It approaches the topic by focusing on image-makers’ engagement with the materials they used to fashion figural works. Chapter 1 presents a survey of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic images created from the Epipaleolithic through the Neolithic periods. It highlights a multiplicity of forms, materials and representational approaches while uncovering recurring patterns. Chapter 2 introduces the principal theories scholars have applied to discuss this corpus, and draws out their similarity with paradigms used in Western scholarship on prehistoric art. The discussion further draws attention to a bi-directional influence exerted on the reception of prehistoric imagery in Europe and China. Chapter 3 focuses on images produced prior to or around 5,000 BCE, and repositions their emergence in the context of broader interests in materiality and representation. The analysis uncovers trends and explores circumstances that notably led image-makers separated in time and space to represent human heads as flat entities. Chapter 4 investigates the role of pareidolia in the emergence of images. It reveals that perceptive imagination informed the creation of some works, when craftspeople drew inspiration from forms in raw materials or artifacts. Chapter 5 explores the possibility that image-makers sought to achieve material-representation synergies. The discussion presents a new taxonomic model addressing materiality and the sensory channels through which figurative images are perceived, and it describes how these factors possibly constituted a core aspect of mimesis. The analysis proposes that some image-makers employed both visual and tactile qualities of substances to represent animals and human beings.

Thesis (PhDEducation)--University of South Australia, 2002.

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.