Tim Forssman - Bushman Rock Art: An Interpretive Guide

Southern Africa boasts one of the richest and most extensive concentrations of rock art anywhere in the world. With individual siteslet alone imagesnumbering in their thousands, this unparalleled heritage is also among the worlds oldest and perhaps most continuous artistic traditions: the earliest examples of rock painting yet found, which come from Apollo 11 Cave, Namibia, date back to around 27,000 years ago, while images continued to be made in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains of KwaZulu-Natal until the dawn of the twentieth century. Archaeologists, of course, are already familiar with the rock art and its importance for understanding southern Africas past, especially the lives and beliefs of the Bushman (or San) hunter-gatherer societies who once lived all across the region. The arts importance as a unifying symbol for South Africas still young democracy is also evident from the prominence that images derived from it have in the national coat of arms. But detailed acquaintance with Bushman paintings and engravings and with the intricate set of ideas and beliefs that motivated their production is still not as widespread, or as easy to access, as it might be.

This book makes an important contribution to achieving that goal and its authorsLee Gutteridge, a well-known guide, instructor and author of praised field guides to the Okavango and the Waterberg, and Tim Forssman, a promising young researcher with extensive experience of the archaeology of Limpopo province and eastern Botswanaare to be congratulated on its publication. Together, they have produced a field guide that covers a truly impressive range of what Bushman art has to show. Moreover, they have succeeded in describing that imagery in an easy-to-grasp fashion that draws on the published scholarship and expertise of many anthropologists and archaeologists, most notably, of course, that of Professor David Lewis-Williams, founder of the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Africas leading centre for rock art studies.

Gutteridge and Forssman begin with a brief account of the diversity of southern Africas rock artof which that produced by Bushmen is simply the largest and most well knownof its place within the broader history of human occupation of the region and of some of the basic tenets of archaeological fieldwork. Importantly, too, since this is a field guide intended for use in the field, they also stress the importance of visiting rock art sites in a responsible fashion that will safeguard paintings and engravings for future generations of visitors and researchers. But the main part of their book rightly concerns itself with what you, the reader, will see in the field: images of people and animals for the most part, but also more enigmatic subject matter, such as dots, flecks, geometric forms of one kind or another and the very relationship between some images and the rock surface on which they were made. For each of these broad categories and the many variations within themfor animals, for instance, they cover species as diverse as elephants and bees, aardvarks and elandsthe emphasis is twofold: what to see and how to recognize it, combined with information drawn from many decades of anthropological and archaeological research as to what particular images, or sets of images, likely meant to those who first executed or viewed them. An impressively extensive and up-to-date bibliography provides ample opportunity to pursue those interpretations further within the broader context of rock art research and southern African archaeology as a whole.