Seeing and Knowing Blundell, Geoffrey; Chippindale, Christopher; Clottes, Jean ...
04/2018
eBook
The purpose of Seeing and Knowing is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of David Lewis-Williams' contribution to rock art research by emphasizing theory and methodology drawn from ...ethnography. Contributors explore what it means to understand and learn from rock art, and a contrast is drawn between those sites where it is possible to provide a modern, ethnographic context, and those sites where it is not. This is the definitive guide to the interplay between ethnography and rock art interpretation, and is an ideal resource for students and researchers alike.
Archives of Times Past Kros, Cynthia; Wright, John; Buthelezi, Mbongiseni ...
02/2022
eBook
Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa's
Deep History explores particular sources of evidence on
southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent
ideas about ...archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa
and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think
we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?'
Historians who specialise in researching early history have learnt
to use a wide range of materials from the past as source materials.
What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them?
When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by
well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these
questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways.
Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts
encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The
book aims to make us think critically about where ideas about the
time before the colonial era originate. It encourages us to think
about why people in South Africa often refer to this 'deep history'
when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays are
written at a time when public discussion about the history of
southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly
than at any other time in the last hundred years. They will appeal
to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and
heritage, museum practitioners and the general public.
Archives of Times Past explores particular sources of
evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It
gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in
southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we
know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European
colonialism?' The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists
and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives
and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they
capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge
beyond the textbook. The essays are written at a time when public
discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial
era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last
hundred years They will appeal to students, academics,
educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum
practitioners and the general public.
Storm Shelter Geoffrey Blundell
Archives of Times Past,
02/2022
Book Chapter
In December of 1992, when I was an archaeology student at Wits University, I joined a field trip with another student and Professor David Lewis-Williams. From Johannesburg, we drove for many hours ...along a route that took us to a remote part of the uKhahlamba mountains near Maclear in the Eastern Cape. The farms at the base of the mountains are used mainly for grazing cattle in summer or they are part of tree plantations, and very few people live there.
Part of our work was to search the rugged foothills for sites of rock paintings that had not yet
Researchers have made significant progress in understanding the symbolism of certain animal images in southern African San rock art. What is less well understood is the combination of specific animal ...body parts to create composite creatures. Identifying the species from which a particular body part is taken allows for further insight and nuance in the current interpretation of San iconography. This paper explores this possibility in relation to images from the WAR2 site in the Drakensberg Mountains of southeastern South Africa. Numerous images at the site are illustrated with tusks. While the paper argues that the tusks at this site are modelled on only one species, the behavioural contexts of tusks are similar for all animals that have them in southern Africa. Linking these contexts and the natural properties of tusks to San ethnography allows for the elucidation of the imagery at WAR2.
Seeing and Knowing Blundell, Geoffrey; Chippindale, Christopher; Smith, Benjamin ...
2012, 2010-12-01
eBook
It is largely through the work of David Lewis-Williams that San rock art has come to be understood so well as a complex symbolic and metaphoric representation of San religious beliefs and practices. ...The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate the depth and impact of his contribution, with particular emphasis on his use of theory and methodology drawn from ethnography, which he employed with inspirational effect in offering his understandings of the meaning and context of rock art. The title echoes Lewis-Williams’s Believing and Seeing, published almost 30 years ago, and the authors explore how to understand and learn from rock art with and without ethnography. Because many of the chapters are based on solid fieldwork and ethnographic research, they offer a new body of work that provides evidence for differentiation between knowing and simply seeing. Many chapters explore studies in rock art regions of the world where variation and constancy can be observed and explored across distances both in space and in time. This volume is unique because it focuses exclusively on rock art and ethnography and covers such a wide geographic range of examples from southern Africa to Scandinavia and the United States.
Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory Blundell, Geoffrey
South African Archaeological Bulletin,
12/2016, Volume:
71, Issue:
204
Book Review
Peer reviewed
Review(s) of: Theory in Africa, Africa in theory, by Wynne-Jones, S and J.B. Fleisher (Eds). 2015, London: Routledge. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-86061-2 (paperback). Price US$46.95.
This paper provides a brief history of neuropsychology in southern African San (Bushman) rock art research before moving on to describe what is known as the neuropsychological model. It shows how the ...model has added a powerful tool to the ethnographically‐based interpretation of the art by applying it to two paintings. Following this, some future possibilities for using the model are discussed.
