Course Outline

A Sense of Place: Understanding the Landscapes of San Painters of the Cederberg

Archaeology Department, University of Cape Town

Instruction

Emeritus Professor John Parkington

Course Summary

The introductory sessions will be held in the various laboratories and seminar spaces of the Archaeology Department at UCT and at the display venues of Iziko Museum and ! Khwa ttu. Instruction and discussions will focus on the rock art of southern San people, the First People of southern Africa, and perhaps the world, and the world view that underlies these images. Through a historical overview of changing views of San motives and motifs, we will approach an understanding of the images of human and animal figures from the perspective of the painters and their contemporary viewers. Recent San ethnographies, nineteenth century ethnohistorical records and a survey of twentieth century accounts of the ontological world views of hunter-gatherer communities from across the world help us understand a perspective on image making that might have been dramatically different from that of most recent interpretations of this ‘art’.

After these preparatory sessions we leave Cape Town to spend time in the field where we encounter, record and map the paintings in the drainages of the Brandewyn and Boontjieskloof streams, tributaries of the Doring and ultimately the Olifants rivers en route to the Atlantic. Our perspective is essentially phenomenological: our working assumption is that the hunter gatherer painters, people known through the early traveller accounts of this area in the seventeenth century AD as Soaqua, were archiving wisdom in the cumulative painted corpus, by repeatedly emphasising themes that underpinned their values, their social practices and their ontological understanding of ‘who they were’. ‘Places’ and ‘landscapes’ were marked and served to define the identities and belongings of hunting and gathering groups in ways quite similar to and probably alongside the stories recorded among other North American, Australian and Asian groups. The nineteenth century stories from the Bleek and Lloyd record, themselves from an engraved rather than painted landscape, support this interpretation.

Practical Outcomes Include

• an understanding of the history of interpretations of San paintings, almost wholly by non-San ‘experts’ under a variety of influences
• an attempt to define San perceptions of their world and their place in it through painted, engraved, narrative and mythological expressions across southern Africa
• an experience of practical site survey and image recording under guidance from professionals in both field archaeology and geomatics
• an introduction to drone capture of painted localities in a topography replete with painted sites
• an awareness of the potential of photographic enhancement for improving the visibility and therefore accessibility of residual painted details
• an involvement in the process of capturing the integration of topographic detail and painted imagery into an understanding of San landscape and place creation.