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    Landscape, Rock Art Recording, Narrative: A Biography of The Harald Pager Archive
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2019) Moodley, Lemishka; Wintjes, Justine
    In the early days of the discipline of archaeology, the archaeologist Sir Charles Thomas Newton stated, in a lecture at Oxford University in June 1880, that “the subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold – the Oral, the Written and the Monumental” (Newton 1880, p.3–7). By ‘oral’, he meant expressions of spoken language as a form of patterned communication passed down from the past, which he considered to be as significant as written texts and traces of the built environment. Newton’s statement also resonates with ongoing attempts to make sense of the fragmentary remains of the past by including living sources with links to those remains, often referred to as ‘oral traditions’. I argue that the domain of ‘oral’ could be extended in the contemporary context to refer to the realm of the ‘spoken word’. The spoken word is mobilised in the telling of personal histories of researchers engaged in making sense of the past, consistent with a move towards the study of the production of archaeological knowledge, and the broader context of the history of science. The past, and the investigation of that past, can be easily lost or erased with time, unless it is documented in some form. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a keen interest in knowing about the world that preceded me. So naturally, movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Mummy (1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), 10 000 BC (2008), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Brother Bear (2003) and many others, fascinated and triggered my overactive imagination. These points of inspiration even prompted many crazy shenanigans and adventures that took place in my back yard. Needless to say, my mother was never impressed because her garden was in constant danger of being destroyed through micro-excavations (as I had to find the treasure I buried the previous evening!). However, it was a Pixar animated film — The Croods (2013) — that recently re-ignited my interest in deeper human history. Despite its status as a relatively mainstream commercial animated film, The Croods sparked my curiosity to find ways to visit the past and bring yesterday’s stories into our lives today. After their cave collapses, the first Crood family has to undertake a journey to find a new home. The father, provider and leader of his pack, recounts multiple stories that urge and caution his children to follow the rules described on the cave wall and to not try anything “new”, or generally be curious for that matter. He sees newness as dangerous, with potentially serious repercussions like death. He prefers for them to dwell in the “safe” compounds of the cave in which they live. He develops “cautionary” narratives through visual means by drawing pictures on the cave walls using pigment and dirt he scoops off the ground. The animated film highlights the ways in which a pictorial expression in the form of rock markings could be enlivened in its original context of performance and story-telling, and, also, the ways in which history is forged through personal experience. The film also prompted me to reconsider the academic realm in which rock art is primarily situated in southern Africa, which is archaeology, and the possible perspectives that other disciplines could bring to bear on these materials, such as art history. My understanding of the reasons why rock art (and its copies) can and should also be considered and studied as an art form, ultimately stems from my own experience in art education. The rock art works made by the San people are encoded with “the history and culture of a society” that is “thousands of years old” and “a testament of the displaced ancient African culture and the San presence in the world” (Solomon 2005). By studying these traces as artworks, researchers, historians and archaeologists are reminded to look at the visual features, but also beyond the physical aspects of the work. They begin to consider the processes that contributed to its making, and the various interpretations and meanings that the work had in its context of production, as well as in its subsequent readings. An examination of the process of knowledge production not only draws attention to the development of artmaking and the manner in which different materials were used to create artworks, but also demonstrates the precarious nature of the meaning of rupestrian imagery. An example of this instability of meaning is evidenced by a body of oral histories relevant to the San context, starting with Joseph Orpen’s documentation (1874) of a mountain Bushman called Qing’s account of the meaning behind particular rock art panels. Thereafter, in 1911, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd produced Specimens of Bushmen Folklore, a book of 87 recorded legends, myths and other traditional stories of the |Xam Bushmen in their now-extinct language (Solomon 2005). These resources integrated the “spoken word” with Bushman ethnographic research and laid the foundation for how we read and write about the art today, and they also provide numerous different ways into the question of interpretation. I have utilised my previous first-hand experience as an intern at the Origins Centre, where Simone Opperman and myself worked under the guidance of Steven Sack and Lara Mallen. In working towards the exhibition titled, The Origins of Walter Battiss: “Another Curious Palimpsest”, we worked closely with the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI), and my interest in rock art and its archive grew immensely. Here, I learned of the Harald Pager archive, which is physically located at RARI. After speaking to my supervisor, Dr Justine Wintjes, and listening to the way in which she briefly recounted the story of Harald Pager, who was an active rock art recorder and researcher during the 1960s and 1970s, I wanted to learn more about the man who seemingly died for his craft. Wintjes mentioned that Pager recorded San rock art in the Drakensberg area along with his wife for many years. The Pagers relied heavily on their personal resources in order to keep the recording and documentation process going, and ended up incurring financial debt. Harald Pager was passionate about archaeology and sought to understand the rock paintings he discovered in his travels across the region, which also included what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). In one of the conversations held in the course of my Masters research, Neil Lee explained that Pager dwelled for months on end in a shelter in order to finish the copies of rock paintings he sought to record. Pager’s adamance and determination, and even his belief that he could change his metabolism, apparently led to ill health while recording rock art in the Brandberg in 1985. He died a short time later in Windhoek (Neil Lee 2018, pers. comm.). 7 Given the scale and meticulousness of Pager’s archive, and in light of the conversations I had about him, it seemed strange that his work and story are engaged with so seldom within academia. Nevertheless, Pager’s vast archive lives on in the storerooms of RARI, and now also in the digital world. His recordings were recently digitised during the course of the South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA) project, which sought to scan and make more accessible the content related to southern African rock art at RARI and other institutional and private archives. With the rapid rate at which technology is developing and progressing, physical archives are being turned into digital databases, while also being supplemented by newly created digital materials. However, like all archives, digital archives are not ‘permanent’. They have their own kind of media-specific fragility. The digital archive also has the potential to become obsolete and demonstrates a different kind of limited lifespan. Although digital files are also not physically present in the same way that a physical copy or photograph is, and “lose” a particular kind of materiality and stability, they gain a virtual presence and potentially greater accessibility. As with the ‘original’ archive of rock art that exists in the landscape, the traditional paper archive and the digital archive represent different kinds of longevity and fragility, and have a complex relationship with each other. While being subject to changes and deteriorations of various kinds, the archive is important as a record of archaeological materials in the landscape, but is also a site where knowledge is produced, and the practice of science is conducted. Thus, I set out to devise a project that would address some of these interests and problems, to find connections between the present and the past, and to focus on ‘process’ across the rock art archive in the broad sense of the term. I also wanted my project to address absences and silences within the archive, embedded within the documents and copies as well as the rock art itself. I approached the archive as a layered domain that extends beyond the strictly ‘documentary’ archive, and adopted a ‘personal histories’ approach as a way of forging connections across that archive. I explain this working strategy in more detail in the ‘Methodology’ section below, but first I explore some of the conceptual elements that frame the project.
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    Mapping the Ethnographic Expedition: A Re-Configuration of the Frobenius Archive
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Boshoff, Janus Jacobus; Wintjes, Justine
    This dissertation considers the building and dwelling (archiving) activities of researchers working within archive spaces as intrinsically connected to the treatment of pictorial material as a primary archive source. The report focusses on the cumulative work of a group of researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand, called the Frobenius Working Group (FWG), in relation to the historic activities of and archive material produced by a German archaeological and ethnographic expedition group under the direction of Professor Leo Frobenius that visited southern Africa between 1928 and 1930 (known as the 9th Expedition). By exploring past and present tensions and connections between the landscape and archive, and the activities and working practices of the FWG and the Frobenius expedition, and by closely studying pictorial archive material, the aim of this research is to interrogate whether the archive can be re-configured as a space where active participation can lead to new and alternative interpretations and understandings. The paper is written in a theoretical, reflective, first person narrative and processual style which reflects the researcher’s personal journey and the thinking processes inherent in the work of research, and explores the contents of and access to the physical and online Frobenius archive, the geography of the landscape and the archive, and the modes of research of the 9th Expedition and the FWG. The research project is thus situated within a physical and a conceptual landscape which suggests that research activities can be considered dwelling practices. The application of theoretical frameworks of landscape, place and space, dwelling and building, provides insight into the complexities and possibilities of generating new interpretations of and additions to the archive, and makes a case for archives as spaces of dwelling where activity bridges time and space, and the researcher can become both active viewer and contributor. The dissertation postulates that the archive can be a field of discovery where active participation can generate new material and insights which deepen our connection to landscape and social activity. The archive as dwelling place is considered not just as an external entity but also as dwelling in us. The emphasis is on configuration and dialogue as the mode of dwelling through which we not only make the archive a dwelling place, but ourselves a dwelling place for the archive. Archiving is a dynamic process in which the sources are considered in order to be configured into new orders. This dynamism requires the bridging and fusing of horizons into productive and co creative partners. This research report finds that the archive does not require re-configuring for it is already a re-configured space. The archive marks the beginning of the researcher’s journey which does not only look at history but, through the research activity, contributes to the constant and continual re-configuration of the archive. This journey conforms to processes of living which are temporal and shaped by social interaction and the continual formation of the landscape. In turn, these life processes contribute to the constant re-configuration of the landscape and archive space. By contributing new material, knowledge and understandings, the researcher forms part of the making of history, thereby ensuring the continued growth, life, and relevancy of the archive.