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.

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

Thesis (M.A.I.S.)--Oregon State University, 2002. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-148). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This dissertation applies the contextual approach, as outlined by Patrick Carmichael, to the rock art of the Nasca Valley (Grande River System, Department of Ica, Peru). This approach uses different sources of information so as to construct a basic, indigenous framework within which to view and interpret the subject matter of an art object for which there is no written information due to its age. In this dissertation, I used information about the local environment and archaeology, as well as the art historical methods of formal and iconographic analyses. Comparative information was provided through ethnographic analogy to Andean myths and practices. Data for this study was gathered in a rock art survey that was carried out during the spring of 2000. This survey covered the lower part of the Nasca valley, downriver from the site of Cahuachi and southwest from the Nasca Pampa, site of the greatest concentration of geoglyphs in the south coast. Information about the location, orientation, and the relationship to archaeological and natural features, gathered in the survey, are examined in order to provide informed hypotheses about Nasca Valley rock art's function and use. The study reveals that rock art sites may have marked points of transition in the natural and cultural landscape. A concern for water is also suggested by the location and orientation of the rock art, and petroglyphs that display evidence of liquid pouring may also relate to local water sources. Using a study of form and iconography, rock art motifs in the Grande River System are separated into types and groups according to similarities to datable, portable art and to geoglyphs, providing a tentative time frame for their making. In the Nasca Valley, one period of petroglyph making activity is contemporary to Paracas Cavernas and another dates to the Early Intermediate Period (Nasca). On the upper valleys such as Palpa, Aja, and Santa Cruz, petroglyph-making activity seems to be largely associated to Paracas Necropolis and there does not seem to be Nasca rock art at those locations. With this contextual information at hand, I provide a re-evaluation of the Nasca Mythical Killer Whale motif, which is depicted in two Nasca Valley rock art sites. I propose using a new name for this motif: The Aquatic Composite Being. The location and iconography of this motif's petroglyphs provide additional information that contributes to our understanding of the meaning of this motif in Nasca art. / text

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1977.

The rock engraving site of Driekopseiland, west of Kimberley in the Northern Cape is distinctively situated on glaciated basement rock in the bed of the Riet River, and has a wealth of over 3500 engravings, preponderantly geometric images. Most other sites in the region have greater proportions of, or are dominated by, animal imagery. In early interpretations, it was often considered that ethnicity was the principal factor in this variabilty. From the 1960s the focus shifted more to establishing a quantative definition of the site, and an emperical understanding of it within the emerging cultural and environmental history of the region. / Magister Artium - MA (Anthropology/Sociology)

The main purpose of this study was to investigate and examined the politics in the production of archaeological knowledge especially in rock art, at academic, heritage institutions and national and global level. It aims to trace and examine the development and movement of particular hypotheses or interpretations and their appropriateness in the study and management of rock art heritage in southern Africa.

El treball de tesi ha tingut per objectiu estudiar les pintures rupestres del Zemmur, al Sahara Occidental. El Zemmur és una regió muntanyosa molt rica en abrics, que s'obren a les cingleres dels seus turons de gres baixos, aplanats i allargassats. Aquestes pintures foren descobertes al 1995, quan el personal del ministeri de Cultura de la República Àrab Sahrauí i Democràtica les va mostrar a un equip d'arqueòlegs i antropòlegs de la Universitat de Girona. Les campanyes d'estudi continuades que s'han realitzat en aquests jaciments de pintura rupestre prehistòrica des d'aleshores han proporcionat les dades per aquesta investigació. En total es tracta d'un conjunt de 2734 figures repartides en 130 abrics de 5 jaciments diferents: Uad Ymal, Uadi Kenta, Rekeiz Ajahfun, Rekeiz Lemgasem i Asako.Les hipòtesis a contrastar eren dues. La primera que al Zemmur hi havia diversos estils de pintura rupestre. La segona que la majoria d'aquests estils dataven de la prehistòria. Ambdues han pogut ser verificades i s'han aportat arguments que demostren que eren certes.El treball de tesi ha consistit en fotografiar les pintures, digitalitzar-les, reproduir-les i estudiar-les. Concretament l'estudi ha consistit en descriure-les, classificar-les estilísticament i datar-les. La classificació s'ha realitzat a partir d'una sèrie de criteris morfològics i tècnics. Posteriorment les imatges han estat atribuïdes a diversos estils, que també havien estat definits amb criteris morfotècnics a partir de l'observació de les imatges. La seva existència, i per tant la verificació de la primera hipòtesi, es dedueix de la presència de recurrències morfotècniques en les representacions. Més tard aquests estils han estat ordenats de manera relativa tot estudiant les seves superposicions. La seqüència dels cinc estils identificats, de més antic a més recent és: Balladors, Modelats, Tracejats, Figures Fosques i Linial.Posteriorment s'ha intentat datar cadascun dels estils a partir de les representacions ja que les anàlisis efectuades indicaren que no era possible datar les imatges per tècniques radiomètriques a causa de la manca de matèria orgànica en les pintures. En qualsevol cas, gràcies a les representacions d'armes, d'animals i els textos escrits hem pogut verificar que la majoria d'elles són prehistòriques, tal com apuntàvem en la nostra segona hipòtesi. Finalment s'ha arribat a la conclusió que l'estil dels Balladors data, de manera molt aproximada, d'ara fa entre 3800 i 3200 anys tal com indiquen les representacions d'alabardes. L'estil Linial, el més recent, data d'entre ara fa 2400 i 2000 anys perquè és acompanyat de textos líbico-berbers però no de representacions de camells. Els estils Modelat, Tracejat i Figures Fosques es daten entremig.A part de les conclusions obtingudes, un dels resultats més importants d'aquest treball ha estat la realització del corpus de pintura prehistòrica del Zemmur que consta, com ja hem dit, de milers d'imatges. Per tant aquesta recerca, a més de tractar sobre un material inèdit i d'un gran interès històric, hauria d'ésser útil per a la gestió de tot aquest patrimoni. / The goal of the PhD is to study the rock-paintings of the Zemmur (Western Sahara). The Zemmur is a hilly area with many rock-shelters, which are pierced in the slopes of his sedimentary, low, flat and long hills. These paintigs were discovered in 1995 when the staff of the Ministry of Culture of the Sahrawi Democratic and Arabic Republic show them to a team of archaeologists and antrophologists from the Girona's University. The continued research campaigns have provided the data for this research, that is, 2734 images found in 130 rock-shelters of 5 different sites: Uad Ymal, Wadi Kenta, Rekeiz Ajahfun, Rekeiz Lemgasem and Asako.The hypothesis to contrast along this reserach were two. The first was that in the Zemmur several painting styles existed. The second was that most of these styles belong to prehistoric ages. Both have been verified as true and several arguments have been presented in order to support them.The research developed in making photos to the paintings, scanning, reproduce and study them. The study consisted in describing the paintigs, classify them in styles and dating the styles. The classification has been done in basis a morphological an technical criteria. After that, the images have been assigned to several styles, which had also been defined by morphotechnical criteria. The existence of these styles, and so the verification of the first hypothesis, is deduced from the presence of morphotechnical recorrences in the representations. Later those styles have been arranged in basis to the superpositions of images. The sequence of the five indentified styles, from the most ancient to the most recent, is: Dancers', Shaped, Stroked, Dark Figures, and Linial.At the end an attempt to date those styles has been done. Previous analisis had proven that radiometric datations were not possible due to the lack of organical remains in the paintigs. However the depictions of weapons, animal beings and texts have been useful in proving that most of these images belong to prehistoric ages, as our second hypothesis proposed. Finally we have reached the conclusion that the Dancers' style is dated, in a very aproximate way, between 3800 and 3200 years before us, as the depictions of hallebards prove. The Lineal style, the most recent, dates between 2400 and 2000 years before us because the presence of lybico-berber texts and the absence of camels. The Shaped, Stroked and Dark Figures styles should be between 3200 and 2400.Besides those conclusions, one of the most important results from this research has been the creation of the corpus of prehistorical rock-paintigs of the Zemmur, with thousands of reproduced images. So this research, besides having a great historical interest and bringing new data, should be useful to manage this archeological heritage.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-373).

The rock engraving site of Driekopseiland, west of Kimberley in the Northern Cape is distinctively situated on glaciated basement rock in the bed of the Riet River, and has a wealth of over 3500 engravings, preponderantly geometric images. Most other sites in the region have greater proportions of, or are dominated by, animal imagery. In early interpretations, it was often considered that ethnicity was the principal factor in this variabilty. From the 1960s the focus shifted more to establishing a quantative definition of the site, and an emperical understanding of it within the emerging cultural and environmental history of the region.