A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2016. / This dissertation examines the role of remote sensing on rock art survey and is motivated by two key objectives: to determine if remote sensing has any value to rock art survey, furthermore if remote sensing is successful to determine if these individual remote sensing components can contribute to a predictive (site locating) model for rock art survey. Previous research effectively applied remote sensing techniques to alternate environmental studies which could be replicated in such a study. The successful application of google earth imagery to rock art survey (Pugin 2012) demonstrated the potential for a more expansive automated procedure and this dissertation looks to build on that success. The key objectives were tested using three different research areas to determine remote sensing potential across different terrain. Owing to the nature of the study, the initial predictions were formulated using the MARA database – a database of known rock art sites in the surrounds of Matatiele, Eastern Cape – and were then applied to surrounding areas to expand this database further. Upon adding more sites to this database, the predictions were applied to Sehlabathebe National Park, Lesotho and then 31 rock art sites in the areas adjacent to Underberg. The findings of this research support the use of predictive models provided that the predictive model is formulated and tested using a substantial dataset. In conclusion, remote sensing is capable of contributing to rock art surveys and to the production of successful predictive models for rock art survey or alternate archaeological procedures focusing on specific environmental features. / LG2017

Ph.D. university of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Art History), 2012 / Pictorial copies play an essential role in the creation of rock art knowledge, forming a bridge between the art and theories of interpretation. My thesis traces a ‘pictoriography’, that is, a historiography of the practice of recording rock paintings in pictures. I begin with the earliest examples dotting the shifting edges of the Cape Colony from the mideighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the Maloti-Drakensberg, where two case studies bring this disciplinary history into more recent times. The first is the rainmaking group from Sehonghong Shelter (Lesotho). One of the first rock paintings to be published, it became one of the most iconic in southern Africa. I relate its various copies to one another and to wider views of Sehonghong, revealing how it has been decontextualized and reproduced in diagrammatic form. I develop a ‘digital restoration’, whereby copies circulating independently in the world are returned in digital images to their place of origin. I develop this process further in a site-wide study of eBusingatha Shelter (AmaZizi Traditional Authority Area, KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg). Once an impressive painted gallery, eBusingatha has been severely damaged by vandalism, removals and collapse, while documents tracking its demise accumulated elsewhere. I reunite scattered records, enabling copies to be contextualized and lost visual qualities of the originals to be restored. Throughout these pictorial genealogies, I explore the distance between the way the rock paintings are illustrated and the way they actually look. While recording strategies are diverse, one dominant convention has emerged in recent decades. Meticulous tracings converted into monochrome redrawings effect a translation of complex and ambiguous painted occurrences into clean forms ‘peeled’ from the rock and projected like shadows onto paper. The are more like text than picture. Colour for instance is considered an integral part of painting traditions worldwide, yet is expunged from the study of San rock paintings. A reintegration of such pictorial attributes into their study may encourage a return to the material world of the imagery and a contextualization of the semantics of its symbolic constituents.