San Rock Art. J.D. Lewis-Williams

The Prime Minister of South Africa, General J.C. Smuts, wrote to Breuil: ‘You have upset all my history … When you publish these paintings, you will set the world on fire and nobody will believe you.’13Today we know that ‘The White Lady of the Brandberg’, famous though ‘she’ is, is neither white nor a lady: the image is of a male figure carrying a bow. The Abbé somehow missed seeing its penis.

      During this period of consensus, San rock art became known to the public by means of profusely illustrated books, often in themselves very beautiful. Bleek’s wish that more copies would become available seemed to be fulfilled – but there was a problem. Although some of these books challenged the racist stereotypes of the time, most simply reflected, entrenched and disseminated colonial estimations of the San as childlike people who made naive pictures of their daily life. Indeed, the art as a record of daily life (with a small admixture of ‘mythology’) was the generally accepted concept of the art. Because rock art research deals with inanimate, apparently ancient images painted or engraved on rock surfaces, it has sometimes given the impression that it is removed from direct comment on the makers of the art, the San themselves. The full impact of the concept-forming role of these books has thus been concealed.

      Despite these problems, it must be said that much useful empirical work was done during these decades of consensus. The names of such indefatigable researchers as Harald Pager, Alex Willcox, Bert Woodhouse, Neil Lee, the Focks (husband and wife), the Rudners (also a husband and wife team), Lucas Smits, the artist Walter Battiss, and Townley Johnson deserve honourable mention. Researchers still consult their picture-filled books. But during this period Bleek’s sense of ‘religious feelings’ was ignored and the art was primarily seen as a secular record of daily activities.

      The second node of conflict (1967–1972)

      In the watershed year of 1967, three academic papers introduced a new quantitative technique for rock art research. Researchers hoped that by adopting this seemingly objective approach, rock art research would fall into line with ‘mainstream’ archaeology, which was at that time emphasising scientific method. In one of these papers, Patricia Vinnicombe set out the numerical system she was using to compile quantitative inventories of the southern Drakensberg rock art. In another she suggested that the high percentage of eland depictions indicated ‘the important part this animal played in both the economy and religious beliefs of the painters’.14In the third paper Tim Maggs summarised his independent quantitative work in the Cederberg. He too concluded that the large number of eland paintings suggested ‘some particular importance of a religious nature’.15It seemed that rock art research was poised on the threshold of a great advance, but few researchers were prepared to undertake the exhausting and time-consuming work that the numerical recording and analysis of, literally, thousands of paintings demanded.