Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: An abiding issue in rock art studies is the question of how to understand composition and relatedness in imagery that is scattered across many neighbouring caves and rock shelters. We tackle this issue using standard archaeological notions of spatial distributions and content, in this case as manifest in painted imagery. It is a given that archaeological assemblages, whether of stone tools, food waste, or imagery both parallel and complement one another in generating an overall narrative. We identified a number of life history and, in some cases gendered, social events in the corpus of local San painters and believe this to be a caching of wisdom, broadly an ontological framework, that created a painted landscape by connecting meaningful places. The relatively permanent location of paintings on rocky surfaces implicates these shelters and caves in the understanding of “meaningful.” Following recent practice, and referring to both local and global literature on landscape definition among hunter-gatherer communities, we find a recursive relationship between person and place, implying a role for paintings in defining and confirming identity at both the social and personal levels. We offer the historical narrative of a living landscape, alive with imagery that helped transform spaces into places, integrated images and canvases, natural and artefactual, into lived locations, and generated a material, visual archive of socially significant occasions and values. We propose a distributed, physically discontinuous but conceptually integrated painted canvas that augmented and expanded contemporary, less materially constituted, stories and other cultural expressions.
Source: de arte
Authors: John Parkington, Joe Alfers, Alice Parkington
Institution: University of Cape Town
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4416937496