Boffin makes a rock painting from the Cederberg really rock
● An ancient rock painting in the Cederberg has been brought to life, reviving the sounds SA’s first people made to summon rain to their arid landscape.
The image, portraying eight people using bullroarers (an ancient musical instrument), led Wits University researcher Neil Rusch to recreate them and record the sound.
After further research, he and colleague Sarah Wurz concluded that the “whirr whirr” sound of the bullroarers was probably used — by women and men — to bring rain to the Karoo.
Rusch said he was immersed in research on artefacts that might have been musical instruments when he received a call from a friend who had travelled to the Cederberg.
“Prior to that phone call, we had investigated a number of artefacts of the bullroarer type, the oldest from a cave on the southern Cape coast at Matjes River dated between 5,000 and 9,000 years old,” said Rusch, explaining that once replicated and played, it was clearly an instrument and not simply a pendant. The telling evidence, besides the sound, was the wear pattern.
He had previously made a replica of an artefact in the collection at the University of Cape Town school of music. The artefact was found in the 1800s and was said to have been used “to make the bees more abundant”.
Rusch played the replica for the curator, Michael Nixon, “and it brought tears to his eyes”.
With evidence of Khoi and San using bullroarers, Rusch’s ears pricked up when his friend described a Cederberg rock painting.
“I had spent so many years producing books on rock engravings and paintings but this particular painting had never come up. So as soon as I could, I went to the Cederberg with some collaborators to see the painting.”
The images were at least 2,000 years old and faded, but the photographs he took brought them back to life with the use of digital enhancement software.
“We had no idea what we would be able to see, but suddenly the oldest image came up and we knew for sure it was of someone playing an aerophone,” said Rusch.
“There was enough detail in the images that you could see the shape and length of the slat of wood and the string attached to the stick that swings it around.”
Having replicated archived versions of the instruments, Rusch went about doing the same using the images, and made more recordings. This process was placed in the context of the topography and landscape of the region, as well as the time frame provided by the archaeology of the Doring River valley where the painting was found.
Rusch said the study — just published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports — concluded that “the painting and the sound-making depicted is most likely related to ‘working with rain’, an intervention aimed at influencing … the hydrology in the arid Karoo region”.
Wurz said sound was often the element missing from archaeological records. “Where these instruments are played is also important to understand how they sounded in context.”
Earlier, she and colleagues found an artefact in the southern Cape that looked like a button. But when they replicated it and linked it to the ethnographic record, they believed it was used to make sound. When they played it in a cave, they discovered the “whirr whirr” sound was strongly enhanced.
Wurz said it was significant that the Cederberg rock painting depicts men and women. “This is the first time a scene of a group playing bullroarers together has been recorded,” she said.
“There has always been an emphasis on a male shaman making sound and music, but here we see a depiction of a group activity with females and males.”