“Extensive recording during the last 50 years has revealed about 40.000 individually painted images in over 600 rock shelters. Mostly painted by San hunter-gatherers, the number of paintings in individual sites varies greatly, from only one image in some instances to more than a 1000 in four sites. One such site is Eland Cave in the northern uKD where Pager (1971) counted 1639 individual images. Complementing the abundance of imagery is the remarkable detail with which they were painted. Occasionally there are human figures with toes, fingers, facial features and hairs, while animal figures were sometimes painted with eyes and hairs standing on end. Elements of material culture, such as musical instruments, bows and arrows, and digging sticks are also represented.
Interpretation of ethnographic insights provided by San people during the 19th and 20th centuries have revealed that the paintings are deeply imbued with symbolic meaning, reflecting the San’s belief systems and the visions of shamans in trance (e.g. Lewis-Williams 1981, 2003). Supporting this framework is the presence of a significant number of explicitly shamanistic paintings, such as therianthropes and trance buck. Advances in absolute and relative dating since the 1990s have shown that the San uKD painting tradition is older than previously thought, going back at least 3000 years or perhaps slightly earlier.”
-by Aron Mazel, The Digging Stick' Volume 35, No 1
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