Download or read book San Rock Engravings Marking the Karoo Landscape written by and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vast spaces of the Karoo abound with images pecked, incised or engraved onto rock surfaces. These landscape markings, generally known simply as ‘rock engravings’, were created in the pre-colonial period by San hunter-gatherers who roamed this land in search of sustenance and water. Their engravings most commonly (though not always) depict animals such as eland, quagga or elephant, and reflect, in fascinating and unusual ways, the relationship of the San to the harsh environment of the Karoo. San Rock Engravings explores the visual legacy of these ancient artists, the signs they left on the land and the meanings that could be attached to them. Neil Rusch’s superb photographs, complemented by John Parkington’s thought-provoking text, bring to life these enigmatic markings and the way of life of their creators. Neil Rusch is an independent publisher, writer and photographer. He entered publishing after studying journalism at Rhodes University and later became the editor of SA Yachting magazine. He has produced The Mantis, the Eland and the Hunter and other books in the Follow the San series for the Krakadouw Trust and the Living Landscape Project. John Parkington is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, and has had a lifelong research interest in southern African hunters and gatherers. He has published a number of academic papers and books on the subject and is involved in the Living Landscape Project in Clanwilliam.
Download or read book Karoo Rock Engravings written by John Parkington and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Stone and Legend written by Renée Rust and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-08-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few travellers through the relentless expanse of the Karoo take in much beyond the band of tar stretching arrow-straight ahead of them through the endlessness. Yet this ancient land hides a treasure trove of rock art: the scorched mountains at its southern edge contain countless overhangs and caves lavishly decorated with handprints, animals and strange creatures. In this book, words and images explore the fascinating relationship of San rock art to shamanistic rituals and to stories that are still told in the Klein Karoo to this day, notably those of mythical beings – half human, half fish – who are said to dwell in the solitary springs and watercourses that nourish this semi-arid region. Known in the vernacular as watermeide, these fabled creatures have the power to heal and destroy, to bring life-giving rain or destructive floods. Filled with a deep reverence for the artists and storytellers of old, Renée Rust and Jan van der Poll have documented a unique piece of living heritage. Through them, the rock begins to breathe and the ancient pictograms reach out to us across the ages. Archaeologist Renée Rust has a doctoral degree from the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Stellenbosch University. She has been researching and documenting the San paintings found in the mountains and ravines of the Klein Karoo and further afield in the Langeberg and Outeniqua Mountains for more than two decades. She lives on a farm in Grabouw with her husband and children. Jan van der Poll worked as a journalist, advertising copywriter and translator before embarking on a career in photography. After a decade with CapeNature, he joined the Western Cape government’s museum service where he records the rich heritage of local communities. He is a member of the South African Archaeological Society and a keen mountaineer.
Download or read book Water Stone and Legend written by Renée Rust and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This work is based on research conducted by Reneae Rust towards a PhD degree in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Stellenbosch."--T.p. verso.
Download or read book Narratives and Journeys in Rock Art A Reader written by George Nash and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why publish a Reader? Today, it is relatively easy and convenient to switch on your computer and download an academic paper. However, as many scholars have experienced, historic references are difficult to access. Moreover, some are now lost and are merely references in later papers. This can be frustrating.
Download or read book The Cutting Edge Khoe San rock markings at the Gestoptefontein Driekuil engraving complex North West Province South Africa written by Jeremy Charles Hollmann and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses rock engravings on the wonderstone hills just outside Ottosdal, South Africa. Much of the rock art has been destroyed due to mining activities, with very few records and the largest remaining outcrop is still threatened. The study hopes to bring this situation to the attention of the public and the heritage authorities.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Rock Art written by Christopher Chippindale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.
Download or read book Deciphering Ancient Minds The Mystery of San Bushmen Rock Art written by David Lewis-Williams and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goes to the heart of contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern" minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic conclusions about the nature of ancient societies. How did ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.
Download or read book Rock Art and Regional Identity written by Jamie Hampson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the ancient artists create paintings and engravings? What did the images mean? This careful study of rock art motifs in the Trans-Pecos area of Texas and a small area in South Africa demonstrates that there are archaeological and anthropological ways of accessing the past in order to investigate and explain the significance of rock art motifs. Using two disparate regions shows the possibility of comparative rock art studies and highlights the importance of regional studies and regional variations. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers.
Download or read book Archival Theory Chronology and Interpretation of Rock Art in the Western Cape South Africa written by Siyakha Mguni and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advocates the archival capacity of rock art and uses archival perspectives to analyse the chronology of paintings in order to formulate a framework for their historicised interpretations.
Download or read book The Figured Landscapes of Rock Art written by George Nash and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A companion to The Archaeology of Rock-Art (Cambridge 1998), this new collection edited by Christopher Chippindale and George Nash addresses the most important component around the rock-art panel - its landscape. The Figured Landscapes of Rock-Art draws together the work of many well-known scholars from key regions of the world for rock-art and for rock-art research. It provides a unique, broad and varied insight into the arrangement, location, and structure of rock-art and its place within the landscapes of ancient worlds as ancient people experienced them. Packed with illustrations, as befits a book about images, The Figured Landscapes of Rock-Art offers a visual as well as a literary key to the understanding of this most lovely and alluring of archaeological traces.
Download or read book San Representation written by Keyan Tomaselli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The San or Bushmen of southern Africa have exerted a fascination over generations of writers and scholars, from novelists and anarchists to ethnologists and geneticists, and also occupy a special place in the popular imagination as the First People and the contemporary remnant of spiritual and natural man. The ways in which particular groups of people from southern Africa have been traditionally categorised and positioned as objects of scrutiny by a range of academic disciplines is increasingly being contested and questioned. There is a growing awareness of the cultural, economic and genetic entanglement of the peoples of the region. This book examines how San and Khoe people are represented, by others, as well as by those who identify as San or Khoe. The book interrogates the ways in which disciplines, through their methodologies and ways of authorising knowledge, not only "discover" or "reveal" knowledge but produce it in ways that involve complex and often ambiguous relationships with power structures and forms of intellectual, symbolic and cultural capital. One major trend that emerges is that the San and Khoe can no longer be seen as people of the past but have to be acknowledged as contemporary and socially situated individuals and communities who are increasingly contesting the representations which others have imposed on them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies.
Download or read book The Kivas of Heaven written by Gary A. David and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orion dominates the winter sky, flanked by Taurus the Bull on one side and Canis the Great Dog on the other-three key constellations for the Hopi and prehistoric Pueblo People of the American Southwest. When these stars appear in the entryway of the kiva roof, they synchronize the sacred rituals being performed below. Here we see how a complex ceremonial cycle mirrors the turning of the heavens. Stargates, UFOs, Indian Mothman, natural psychedelics, cannibal giants, psychic archaeology, earth chakra lines, and the Hopi-Egyptian connection-this book is packed with fascinating and little-known facts about one of the most mysterious and secretive tribes on the North American continent. You will come away with a deep appreciation of the way the Ancient Ones viewed the world above. Chapters include: What is a Kiva?; Stargates in Antiquity; New Mexico’s Orion Kivas; Colorado’s Orion Temple; Hopi Flying Saucers; Arizona’s Psychic Archaeology; Hopi Kachinas and Egyptian Stars; 2012 Supernova?; Book of Revelation and 2012; Indian Mothman and Sacred Datura; Tales of Giants and Cannibals; Chaco Canyon: Mirror of Sirius; Dog Stars in the Land of Enchantment; The Chaco-Chakra Meridian; Seven Spiritual Cities of Gold; Orion’s Global Legacy; more.
Download or read book Working with Rock Art written by Benjamin Smith and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting edge contributions that consider new approaches to the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. This volume contains contributions that consider new approaches to three areas: the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. Working with Rock Art is the first edited volume to consider each of these areas in a theoretical rather than a technical fashion, and it therefore makes a significant contribution to the discipline. The volume aims to promote the sharing of new experiences between leading researchers in the field. While the geographic focus is truly global, there is a dominant north-south axis with strong representation from researchers in southern Africa and northern Europe, two leading centres for new approaches in rock art research. Working with Rock Art opens up a long overdue dialogue about shared experiences between these two centres, and a number of the chapters are the first published results of new collaborative research. Since this volume covers the recording, interpretation and presentation of rock art, it will attract a wide audience of researchers, heritage managers and students, as well as anyone interested in the field of rock art studies.
Download or read book Handbook of Rock Art Research written by David S. Whitley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there has always been a large public interest in ancient pictures painted or carved on stone, the archaeological study of rock art is in its infancy. But intensive amounts of research has revolutionized this field in the past decade. New methods of dating and analysis help to pinpoint the makers of these beautiful images, new interpretive models help us understand this art in relation to culture. Identification, conservation and management of rock art sites have become major issues in historical preservation worldwide. And the number of archaeologically attested sites has mushroomed. In this handbook, the leading researchers in the rock art area provide cogent, state-of-the-art summaries of the technical, interpretive, and regional advances in rock art research. The book offers a comprehensive, basic reference of current information on key topics over six continents for archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and rock art enthusiasts.
Download or read book Rock Engravings of Southern Africa written by Thomas A. Dowson and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visionary Animal written by Renaud Ego and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated collection that takes stock of current knowledge and proposes a new way of reading indigenous art For thousands of years, nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence. Renaud Ego posits that the artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and,ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers. Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary,who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance.Visionary Animal is a translation of L’Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author’s photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.
