Rock artwork is widespread throughout southern Africa and consists of a variety of depictions resembling human figures, animals, dots, handprints, and different painted or engraved imagery on rock surfaces. The rock artwork custom of work was made by San hunter gatherers over hundreds of years.
The primary dance scenes in southern African rock artwork had been documented 100 years in the past. However there’s been some confusion as as to if sure scenes might certainly be interpreted as a dance.
Dance might be merely outlined as intentional and organised bodily motion. It additionally capabilities as an expression of temper and a type of nonverbal communication. In southern African cultures, dance can be carried out throughout moments of celebration and in ritual contexts. Typically dancers go right into a trance.
Students up to now have interpreted the dances in San rock artwork as ritual dances, primarily trance dances. However ethnography (the research of dwelling individuals) factors to the truth that San communities additionally danced for leisure and leisure. Therefore the necessity to systematically study and categorise dancing scenes within the rock artwork.
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We’re archaeologists with a particular curiosity in sound and music in rock artwork. In a current research, we examined chosen dancing scenes in rock artwork from 4 of South Africa’s provinces: the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, the Japanese Cape and the Western Cape. The purpose was to classify the various kinds of dances depicted and to discover whether or not all dancing scenes symbolize ritual performances or whether or not some may mirror leisure or leisure actions.
We concluded that a few of the performances depicted had been seemingly undertaken for leisure and delight moderately than ritual functions.
We hope that our research offers a method to categorise dancing scenes in San rock artwork. This framework might be refined and expanded by future researchers working in music archaeology, the research of sound and its results, or the iconographic evaluation of musical devices and dance imagery (figuring out what the pictures imply). This sort of analysis additionally helps individuals admire their music heritage from the previous.
Sources and classes
Our article examined chosen dancing scenes by means of a literature evaluate and by consulting the African Rock Artwork Digital Archive database curated by the Rock Artwork Analysis Institute on the College of the Witwatersrand.
We consulted foundational works on rock artwork by pioneers George Stow and Dorothea Bleek (1930), and by more moderen students resembling Patricia Vinnicombe and David Lewis-Williams. Ethnographic accounts by Lorna Marshall (1969, 1976), Richard Katz (1982) and Megan Biesele (1993) of dance amongst San communities within the Kalahari (Botswana) and Nyae Nyae (Namibia) areas additional knowledgeable our evaluation.
Learn extra: An enigmatic theme in San rock work is lastly unlocked
We recognized three broad classes of dances within the ethnographic information: ritual dances, circumstantial dances, and leisure dances. Some circumstantial dances had been carried out to have fun a profitable hunt, whereas leisure dances included these celebrating a newlywed couple, in addition to dances performed merely for enjoyable and video games by girls and boys.
We due to this fact argue that dancing scenes within the archaeological file must be examined critically: not all of them depict rituals.
Learn extra: What archaeology tells us concerning the music and sounds made by Africa’s ancestors
Six factors of identification
To systematically establish dancing scenes, we utilized six analytical attributes:
- physique postures, together with bent figures, outstretched arms and flexed legs
- paraphernalia held by dancers, resembling sticks, rattles or headgear
- interplay between dancers
- proof of synchrony (shifting in unison)
- course of motion
- the gender of the figures represented.
Within the following part, we offer examples of various sorts of dances in rock artwork and recommend how they might be interpreted on the premise of ethnographic info.
Ritual dances
Our research recognized a number of ritual dances depicted within the rock artwork, together with the trance or drugs dance. (An instance is the Attakwas Kloof dance picture above, from a website within the Klein Karoo within the Western Cape.) This is among the most widespread dances amongst San communities. It’s a communal therapeutic follow through which drugs males, believed to own therapeutic powers, deal with the sick by means of contact and dispel dangerous spirits or misfortune.
In the course of the trance dance, males dance whereas ladies sing and clap in accompaniment. A few of the male dancers function healers. The dancers transfer in a round sample, stamping their ft till a shallow furrow kinds on the bottom. Extended dancing induces an altered state of consciousness, throughout which healers might fall or collapse as they enter trance.
In South Africa, a number of types of trance dance are depicted within the rock artwork. These scenes usually present clapping feminine figures accompanying male dancers, who are sometimes proven bending ahead. In some photos, nonetheless, the clapping figures are absent, and solely the dancers are represented.
Ethnographic accounts (for instance, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, 1911: 190) word that leg rattles are generally used throughout trance dances to supply a pointy, rhythmic vibration, but these rattles aren’t ceaselessly depicted within the rock artwork. A notable exception comes from the Halstone website within the Japanese Cape (above), the place a number of dancers are proven carrying leg rattles. Some figures steadiness on dancing sticks and look like in an altered state of consciousness, or in a trance.
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Feminine initiation rituals which are accompanied by eland dances, carried out in the course of the first menstruation ceremony, additionally seem within the rock artwork.
The ladies mimic the strikes of the feminine eland, a spiritually essential animal. These dances are carried out solely by ladies, normally in a secluded area. The dancers transfer in a circle whereas bending ahead, and the ceremony celebrates a woman’s first menstruation. This interpretation is supported by ethnographic analysis performed amongst San communities in Botswana and Namibia by anthropologists resembling Marshall and Biesele.
Different ritual dances depicted within the rock artwork embrace boys’ initiation ceremonies, generally generally known as the Tshoma. This dance marks the transition from boyhood to manhood and is carried out completely by males. The ethnographic accounts talked about above point out that these ceremonies happen in secluded areas away from the primary camp.
We recognized another dance scenes at G3 Web site II (Vinnicombe 1976) (beneath) as probably circumstantial or leisure dances and we steered that this might have effectively been the case for the efficiency depicted at Witsieshoek (backside).
It’s seemingly that, due to their non-ritual nature, circumstantial or leisure dances – which ethnographic literature suggests had been quite common – had been solely not often depicted in work.
Joshua Kumbani, Postdoctoral fellow, College of Tübingen
Margarita Díaz-Andreu, ICREA Analysis Professor, Universitat de Barcelona