Cedarberg Workshop - Part Four - Salmanslaagte Rock Art

The last day of the conference dawned bright sunny and unbelievably hot!

View into the sandstone kloof where the walls are festooned
with rock art.

Salmanslaagte is found on the same farm as Travelers rest and until recently was open to the public. However cos of some idiots lighting illegal fires that threaten the vegetation and animals its now been closed to the public. However we were given special permission to visit the site. 

Approach to Salmanslaagte

The sandstones of the Cedarberg weather to form rockshelters and caves easily.

Ben for scale in a rockshelter  at Salmanslaagte

And many of these shelters were used for rock painting. Likewise many of the excavated shelters and caves have paintings on the walls. Salmanslaagte is situated in a sandstone kloof with large rock walls on either side and many overhangs and shelters. However Salmans' is most famous for a particular panel. 

Inside Salmanslaagte

Closeup of panel

More of Salmans'

The upper pictures above show a panel with four woman in a row. You will see how their arms are raised, hands close together and fingers splayed, this panel is interpreted as women dancing and clapping. Cool. Now look more closely at the yellow part of the image, the women are superimposed over a giant elephant! See the trunk going down between the 2 women on the right? and the front legs below the group of people under the women? This picture indicates that it was painted at different times, on different occasions and possibly by different people. Suggesting a continual use of the shelter over a (long?) period of time. 

Tourists!

Hunter. See the bow? Also note the intrusion of a
 black fungus along the body of the figure
(speckled areas)

These images are currently impossible to date. The black ones like above are made with manganese not charcoal (charcoal can be dated like at Chavet in France, but not manganese). 
Rock art both in the Cedarberg and in other parts of the country tends to contain repetitive themes like men, women, hunting and many strange shapes.

The phoentician ship

Closeup of the Phoenician ship - lower right

There are many legends that suggest that early civilisations might have circumnavigated Africa much earlier than recorded history suggests (thus far there is absolutely no evidence of this). These legends indicate that the sea faring traders, the Phoenicians (who occupied what is now Turkey) might have been the people responsible. So when researchers first found and described this rock art panel in Salmanslaagte they jokingly called this a phoenician ship, a name thats kinda stuck. In truth, no one knows what these symbols are or what they mean. 

Found near Salmans', see the boat?

The interpretation of the meaning of rock art images and their importance and possible meaning to the people that created the rock art is a matter for much debate especially those strange shapes I mentioned. David Lewis-Williams bases his interpretations on shamanistic practices of modern day San hunter-gatherer groups. He suggests that these paintings were created by shamans (or the equivalent thereof) probably after ingestion of hallucinogens and that many of the themes represent spiritual concepts. He refers to the strange shapes as transcendentals. Over the last 20 or more years this thinking has come to dominate rock art interpretations. 
Certainly there are many similarities between San traditions and images in ancient rock art and curiously there are no images of mundane, day-to-day, activities depicted in ancient rock art. However it is completly impossible to test any interpretations. Many agnostics to the Lewis-William school argue that some paintings clearly have very litteral meanings and that the shamanistic view point is being used too restrictively. 
We sat in the cool of that shelter (many people still feeling quite fragile from the night before) for a long time discussing these questions.

Discussing the meaning of rock art

In due course we returned to camp to complete the last few presentations. The conference finished off with Peter Gardenfors from Lund discussing the question of cognition. Cognition referrers (in this context) to modern human thinking. It encompasses things like cooperation, communication, planning, etc. And when you get down to it, this is the bedrock question around which archaeology is based. Lithic analysis of how stone tools were made, interpreting the meaning of painting, looking at what people were eating. It all come back to the same basic questions: When and how and why did we become essentially human? 
It was easily one of the most fascinating talks of the conference but I must have been over 40C in that room, the aircons have given up the dust so I took in a lot less than I would like to have had. It was so hot in fact that my laptop kept crashing. I was using it to try to finish those diagrams for the publication I mentioned in a previous post. PS that publication will be appearing sometime in this month and they are using one of those figures for the cover of the magazine! How rad!

Archaeologist snare! Foolproof! 100% guaranteed to work!
Step 1) Put out bag of rocks
Step 2) Wait!

The only way to cool down after a long conference.

Next week we will discuss the journey home with a stopover at Diepkloof Rock Shelter.

Cedarburg Workshop - Part Three - Mertenhof Rock Shelter

Cedarberg adventures continued...

On the way to Mertenhof

Remember I said my roommate was angry with me? Well here's how she let me know. Ok so as I said last week we were all meeting up at one of the chalets (the one all her friends were staying in) in order to drive to the venue each morning for breakfast. On the first day I do what is normal. Knock on her bedroom door, see that she is up, and chat a bit as we walk together to the meeting point. On the second day I am still getting ready when I hear the chalet door open and shut. I go out my room to find that she has just buggered off without so much as a good morning! What the heck? When I do make it to the meeting point it becomes clear she is shunning me! I am thinking you've got to be kidding me! How can anyone sulk this much over such a little thing? 
When I later try to talk to her about it in a nice way (maybe she is not a morning person, maybe Im over-reacting) she is all bubbly and aplogises for her behaviour the night before but continues to shun me! I really hate this kind of 2-faced behaviour! If you have a problem with me than come out and say so!

Anyway! By day 2 (Sunday) the Cedarberg had turned into a furnace. In the morning we undertook an excursion to Mertenhof Cave. On the way we stopped to admire the views. 

Compare this picture looking south at the Cedarberg
with the previous pictures looking north

What you can (not) see from these pictures is how the sandstones of the Cedarberg give way to the shales of the karoo. The importance of this point is in the availability of caves and rock shelters as well as material for making stone tools on the landscape. It partially explains why there is much more evidence for early man in the Cedarberg than in the Karoo.

Our (fearless) leader for the day's excursion was Alex Mackay, a postdoctoral fellow at UCT.

Alex Mackay pointing out the geology

John Parkington, adding his two cents in! Im starting to think that there
 isnt an archaeological site in the Western Cape that John has not worked on!

Our second stop on the way to the site was once again on the side of the road. From here we could see two caves in the valley yonder. Can you spot them?

The 2 dark spots on the rocks just above the bushes
 in the foreground.

The cave on the left is called Klipfonteinrand first identified (as having archaeological remains) many years ago and excavated by John it was recently re-excavated by Alex. 

Klipfonteinrand - Closeup

With so little time available for exploring we could not go to Klipfonteinrand as well, which is a pity.

I can certainly think of worse places to live than
this! Farm house at Mertenhof (team stays here
during excavations)

 We finally continued our journey, crossing into the Bedouw Valley to a farm called Mertenhof. Alex recently identified and excavated a new rock shelter on the farm to which he gave the same name.

Hiking up to Mertenhof

We parked the cars near the farm house and then hiked up to the shelter. Many people were in sandals, they would rather a snake bite or a busted ankle than the heat.

Simone giving us a pose 

The approach to Mertenhof

Many of these shelters have tricky or difficult approaches with climbing to get to them, maybe for safety purposes?

Can you feel the heat?

Entering the shelter.

Alex and his excavation team had only finished and closed up the shelter about 3 weeks before this visit. Excavations have to be protected between excursions. This is to preserve the material that is in the pits and has not been removed. It is also to preserve the vertical walls of the pits, to stop them slumping back into the deposit. This requires a lot of sandbags!

This is what a closed but active archaeological excavation looks like, all sandbags and tarpaulin.

This excavation needs to be particularly well covered as baboons are active in the area and a baboon in the pit can cause a tremendous amount of damage!

opening up the hole

View into the deposit

The deposits at Mertenhof cover a period from colonial times into the middle stone age.

Closeup of the deposit. The lables mark stratigraphic units
 or layers in the deposits. It helps the excavators and scientists orientate themselves.

It was amusing really. When we arrived at the site Alex rattled off the details of the middle stone age Mertenhof at the speed of light. It was only after we asked him to slow down and give us more details that we learned about the later parts of the deposit, including at least 2 later stone age burials! It was quite clear where his interests lay. Funny how one-tract-minded we can be.

Rock art on the shelter walls.

Tash showing us what dirty work archaeology it!

After lots of archaeology and bit of peace and tranquility it was time to pack up the excavation and head home. Messy, messy work which Tash can attest to!

The day's talks started with Alex and Alex (Mackay and Sumner, who is also a postdoc at UCT) showing us their work in Cedarberg. In the afternoon we had a fauna session which consisted of my supervisor and all his other students presenting their efforts at using different animals to reconstruct the palaeoenvironment. I was expressly told, when I asked my supervisor if I needed to present anything that I have no data and therefore was not allowed. I still find this instruction a little bogus as some of those that presented had no more to say than I do. Oh well its not like I was offering! 

That evening, with most people having already presented, including the student group I was with, the result was a pretty big party. There were some seriously blurry eyes the next morning! As to my roommate, our morning routine now became to not talk to each other! She has continued to give me the cold shoulder, even after we got back to Cape Town! I think on reflection that I may have made some remarks that she took offence to (like winding her up about not coming on some of the outings. I dont believe in missing outings cos one is too tired, hot, bored, jaded or overworked. That is the kind of attitude that misses out on life. This post would have been very short and uninteresting if I had missed out on the excursion just to finish my work or catch-up on sleep!). 

To be continued...