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.