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Rock art and changing perceptions of southern Africa's past: Ezeljagdspoort reviewed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

David Lewis-Williams ,
Thomas A. Dowson  and
Janette Deacon
David Lewis-Williams
Affiliation:
Rock Art Research Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand, 2050 South Africa
Thomas A. Dowson
Affiliation:
Rock Art Research Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand, 2050 South Africa
Janette Deacon
Affiliation:
National Monuments Council, PO Box 4637, Cape Town 8000, South Africa
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Abstract

Since 1835 travellers and scholars have been looking at, and ‘reading’, a strange painting of apparently fish-tailed figures at Ezeljagdspoort, in the southern part of the Cape Province, South Africa. Each reading has been made within some external frame-of-reference, whether supposed histories of racial conflict or Jungian archetypes of child-like primitive insight. These set aside, a surer route to an ‘inside’ reading may be based on our knowledge of Bushman shamanism.

Type
Papers
Information
Antiquity , Volume 67 , Issue 255 , June 1993 , pp. 273 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1993

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