CEDERBERG ROCK PAINTINGS AS A SOCIAL ARCHIVE
Emeritus Professor John Parkington, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town
Monday 22–Tuesday 23 January 11.15 am COURSE FEES R220; Staff and students R110
Many Cederberg rock paintings appear to depict social and life history events and to materialise these in lasting form to create a socially meaningful landscape. As many archaeologists have noted, hunter gatherer landscapes are more than topographic or ecological spaces; they are worlds created by repetitive living in and usages of ‘persistent places’. In this way identity and belonging are co-created along with place and landscape as mutually and inextricably linked concepts. These entanglements include other living forms such as elephant communities, which are viewed as ‘other-than-human-persons’. In this course we exemplify this process by examining the rock paintings of the middle Brandewyn River in the Agter Pakhuis region of the Northern Cederberg.
Lecture titles
- Paintings of human figures
- Paintings of animal forms
Recommended reading
Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Guenther, M. 2015. Therefore their parts resemble humans, for they feel that they are people: Ontological flux in San myth, cosmology and belief. Hunter Gatherer Research 1.3: pp. 277–315.
Hill, E. 2013. Archaeology and Animal Persons: Toward a Prehistory of Human-Animal Relations. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4: 117–136.
Parkington, J. and Alfers, J. 2022. Entangled Lives, Relational Ontology and Rock Paintings: Elephant and Human Figures in the Rock Art of the Western Cape, South Africa. Southern African Field Archaeology 17: article 1228.
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