Rolling stones of ages past
WITS ORIGINS CENTRE: SA ROCK ART FINDS FINAL RESTING PLACE
Interaction between images and surrounds sparked research in ’80s.
The Origins Centre on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg has just opened a new Rock Engraving Archive to the public. This is the biggest collection of rock engravings on the continent.
It is the culmination of decades of shifting policy – and perceptions – of how South Africa should curate its rock art heritage. The exhibition marks a coming home of these extraordinary rocks that it’s now recognised should never have been removed from their natural environment.
The archive contains 76 boulders engraved with intricate images. The engravings depict animals (both realistic and mythological or zoomorphic) and geometric designs. Some depict wagons or text.
Most of the engravings of animals may have been created by San hunter-gatherers, or their ancestors who were among the first people of southern Africa.
There is an ongoing debate about whether the geometric images mark the movement of the Khoi or Khoekhoen stock-herding people. The geometrics may represent the spread of the San and a change in their hunter-gatherer way of life.
The majority of the engravings are on hard dolerite rocks. The main techniques are pecking or fine-lines, where the markings were made with a sharp object (such as a harder, rock or metal). Some of the engravings can only be seen at a certain angle. Then the engravings “magically” appear.
Marks from the sharpening of tools and weapons against the hard surfaces also add a layer of meaning. There are other non-human traces to be found on some of the rock surfaces. Marks made by the repeated rubbing of animals against the rock surface, or through wind and water erosion.
Today, every effort is made to conserve rock engravings in their original context. But in the first half of the 1900s many painted and engraved panels were removed to museum collections. In the ’60s, Wits University’s Dr Emil Paul Friede and Professor Revil Mason from the SA Archaeological Society assembled a major collection of rock engravings that had been removed from their original locations.
The rocks came from the Magaliesberg and the Klerksdorp and Schweizer-Reneke region of the North West. The engravings were arranged for exhibition to the public in the Johannesburg Zoological Gardens (now the Johannesburg Zoo). This was opened in 1970 as the Museum of SA Rock Art.
However, staff and public grew uncomfortable about the social implications of displaying indigenous art in a zoo and in the early ’90s the exhibit was closed. The smaller pieces were taken to Museum Africa, but 36 larger pieces were left at the zoo.
In May 2000, the boulders were removed to Wits’ Rock Art Research Institute. Between 2000 and 2004, a team restored the engravings. The engraved boulders in Museum Africa were moved to Wits University in 2005. In 2017, they were moved to the Origins Centre’s new wing and this year the archive opened to the public.
The first debates about SA rock art centred on who made it and why. Most incorrectly attributed the art to foreigners. While these early interpretations were false, the interest in rock art led to SA’s first heritage legislation – the Bushman-Relic Protection Act of 1911 – which protected rock art, artefacts, and burials, and controlled the export of material to foreign museums.
Until the ’80s little attention was given to recording the context of rock engravings. This changed when researchers began to appreciate how the engravings interacted with the landscape – how the experience of the art transforms with the light, wind, rain, sounds and the viewer’s perspective.
Many of the meanings of the images may be unknown to us but the stories and beliefs of numerous people have been carefully left on these boulders.
Republished from The Conversation