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Contains more than two hundred photographs of Africa's rock art, coupled with historical and interpretive analyses, compiled to raise public awareness of the variety, importance, and frailty of these works.
The only book of its kind to examine cave art throughout Africa. The paintings and engravings discovered in African caves are amazing works of art that hold clues to understanding the history of humankind.
Rock paintings by the San Bushmen are scattered over all of southern Africa; it is estimated that some 15,000 rock art sites are known and possibly as many await discovery. While providing information about the history of these fascinating paintings—considered one of the greatest cultural treasures of humankind—this account also offers insight into their possible interpretations by taking the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town as a starting point. Filled with beautiful illustrations, this record sheds light on San rock art in general and makes sense of the baffling complexity and strangeness of the art form.
Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.
J. David Lewis-Williams is world renowned for his work on the rock art of Southern Africa. In this volume, Lewis-Williams describes the key steps in his evolving journey to understand these images painted on stone. He describes the development of technical methods of interpreting rock paintings of the 1970s, shows how a growing understanding of San mythology, cosmology, and ethnography helped decode the complex paintings, and traces the development of neuropsychological models for understanding the relationship between belief systems and rock art. The author then applies his theories to the famous rock paintings of prehistoric Western Europe in an attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of rock art. For students of rock art, archaeology, ethnography, comparative religion, and art history, Lewis-Williams' book will be a provocative read and an important reference.
This collection of essays on themes such as rain animals and therianthropes focuses on myth and ritual in San rock art. Visionary Animal details the ancient rock art of southern Africa and the significance of the animals depicted in it. Their significance is emphasized with their frequency and meaning can be found in the relationship of these animals and humans. Visionary Animal explores two fundamental categories of anthropology – myth and ritual which have defined the well-established iconological tradition of San rock art interpretation. This richly illustrated collection of essays explores themes such as rain animals and therianthropes that combine human and animal bodies from this point of view.
Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?