What African Rock Art Says About Identity, Survival and Change

To "read" the history of times before writing, scholars have traditionally used excavated evidence. Remains like dwellings, burials, and pots can reveal a lot about how people lived long ago. Rock art tells a tale of people meeting, negotiating, fighting, trading with, and marrying one another. The tale is told not in simple narrative, but in spiritual beliefs. In Southern Africa, rock art is primarily a record of spiritual beliefs - but also reflects the events that these beliefs made sense of, writes Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson for The Conversation. 

Hunter-gatherers in the region, ancestors of today's San or BaTwa, made rock art for thousands of years before African herders and farmers arrived from the north 2,000 years ago and European colonists followed by the sea 350 years ago. As a result of these contacts between groups of people, ethnic and economic boundaries became increasingly blurred. Rock art changed too, in technique and subject matter.

Current Anthropology outlines the nature, scale, and effects of contact between people in Southern Africa, and the ways in which indigenous people produced images that engaged with change. It shows that contact and colonization, in time, created a "disconnect" with the past that can be understood by looking at changes in rock art.