The changer of ways: rock art and frontier ideologies on the Strandberg, Northern Cape, South Africa
Date
2017
Authors
Skinner, Andrew
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Abstract
Southern Africa’s Orange River has been a frontier-zone for centuries, acting as a socially
formative and often volatile expression of its surrounds. Communities of the region have
competed, compounded, and admixed for as long as competing influences have obliged it,
contributing over hundreds of years to a background milieu of generally-coherent beliefs and
practices; ‘frontier ideologies’ that dealt in the expression and mediation of identity, and the
configuration of responses to tumultuous social and ecological conditions. The common core of
these ideologies allowed frontier societies to respond to one another in familiar terms, even if
other channels of meaning were inaccessible. One of the contributors to these ideologies were
the |Xam, most well-known for their contributions to the shamanistic approach to
interpretation of rock art in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of South Africa. While analogy
has allowed them to speak on behalf of the artists of this disparate tradition, they are products
of the area surrounding the Orange River during the nineteenth century. Accordingly, they
demonstrate the fundamental features of a frontier society; they evaluate contact with other
communities relative to themselves, and formulate appropriate expressions of identity to enact
in response. The application of their ethnography is somewhat burdened by their application
to the rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg, however, which casts their motivations in specific,
ritualised terms. This thesis considers a very different body of rock art to the one
conventionally interpreted by the shamanistic approach, but located in a historical and
regional context intimately linked to the |Xam informants; specifically, the rock art of the
Strandberg hills, in the Northern Cape province, South Africa. This body of art is one
dominated by horses, distributed as a structure that spans much of the site, and manufactured
with visibility in mind. This thesis finds that these images were products of the frontier
ideologies that inhabited the region, and the adaptive practices that emerge from them.
Accordingly, the art is characterised as a record of inhabitation, an expression of identity, and
the mediation of contact with a changing landscape, in keeping with the behaviours that had
marked interactions between communities in the region for long before many of the images
were placed on the Strandberg.
Description
University of the Witwatersrand
Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Master of Science (Archaeology) by research.
Rock Art Research Institute; School of Geography, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies. Johannesburg, 2017.
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Citation
Skinner, Andrew (2017) The changer of ways: rock art and frontier ideologies on the Strandberg, Northern Cape, South Africa