Books and Edited Volumes by Sam Challis
Focusing on stunning paintings and engravings from around the world, Powerful Pictures interrogat... more Focusing on stunning paintings and engravings from around the world, Powerful Pictures interrogates the driving forces behind global rock art research. Many of the rock art motifs featured in the 16 chapters of this book were created by indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, and it sheds new light on non-Western rituals and worldviews, many of which are threatened or on the point of extinction. Stemming from a conference in Val Camonica in northern Italy, the book is arranged by continent, although it tackles how early research in some countries (e.g., Sweden, France, Spain, the USA, Canada, South Africa) influenced the trajectory of archaeological investigations in others (e.g., Australia, India, Mexico, Germany, Mongolia, Russia). All of the contributing authors have vast experience working with rock art and Indigenous communities, many of them holding posts in prestigious university departments around the world. The book will be of particular interest to professional historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and indeed anyone who is interested in art, symbolism, and the past.
Quaternary International Special Issue, 2022
The Maloti-Drakensberg of Lesotho and South Africa is Africa’s highest and most expansive mountai... more The Maloti-Drakensberg of Lesotho and South Africa is Africa’s highest and most expansive mountain system south of Kilimanjaro (Tanzania). Its name is hyphenated because the mountain ranges it incorporates span political and modern language and cultural regions and, accordingly, the mountains are seen from different perspectives. Maloti in the Sesotho language means ‘mountains’; the Africaner trekboere saw them as dragon’s (‘drakens’) mountains, today often coupled with the isiZulu term uKhahlamba, or ‘barrier of spears’. The region labelled Drakensberg’ on the KwaZulu-Natal (South African) side of the range simply refers to the escarpment (Mazel, this volume), whereas the highest peaks are inside the Kingdom of Lesotho. Although the mountains themselves were formed during uplift of the central plateau some 20 million years ago, it was the late Quaternary that saw the peopling of the area, with recurrent occupations from at least 83,000 years ago in the Lesotho Highlands (Pazan et al., 2022, this volume). This Special
Issue highlights selected topics pertaining to the varied Late Quaternary
peoples and environments of the mountains across time and space.
Thames & Hudson, 2011
How did prehistoric peoples those living before written records think? Were their modes of though... more How did prehistoric peoples those living before written records think? Were their modes of thought 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 either as 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. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naïve narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth. As this elegantly written, enlightening book so ably demonstrates, the prehistoric mind was in fact as complex and sophisticated as that of contemporary humans.
Articles and chapters by Sam Challis
African Archaeological Review, 2026
The foothills of the Drakensberg are a significant region in understanding the links between envi... more The foothills of the Drakensberg are a significant region in understanding the links between environmental conditions and the spread of social networks across southern Africa. Strathalan Cave is an important site in this region yielding an extensive Holocene-aged deposit. Here, we report on the preliminary results from the ongoing excavations of Strathalan Cave A. Radiocarbon dates place the occupations between c. 5500 and 9000 yrs cal. BP with most occupations focused at around 7200 yrs cal. BP. Three allostratigraphic units were exposed in the deposit (A1, A2 and A3) with unit A2, the most anthropogenic unit, yielding combustion features and layers of bedding. The lithics are flake-dominated Archaeological time period. Later Stone Age. Country and region. NorthEastern Cape of South Africa.
Arid Zone Archaeology Monograph, 2025
For millennia the arid semidesert of the Nama Karoo was home to southern African hunter-gatherers... more For millennia the arid semidesert of the Nama Karoo was home to southern African hunter-gatherers who, during European settler colonial occupation, became embroiled in a fight for their lives 1. People known as the San, or Bushmen, stole stock and fought or even killed settlers in skirmishes. Some of these San people, speaking dialects of the |Xam language, were imprisoned in Cape Town and their testimonies-customs and beliefs-recorded. Their chief deity, it transpired, was synonymous with the praying mantis, both going by the epithet |kaggǝn. Unfortunately, this gave rise to what David Lewis-Williams 2 has called "a gross rendering of an elusive concept". That is, colonists thought the San worshipped an insect. On the contrary |kaggǝn, "the Mantis", was a man with a wife, children and relatives and could assume the form of whichever animal he chose, in the adventures and misadventures from which he almost invariably had to extricate himself or be rescued. He had created the world and the first antelope and did his best to ensure hunters could not take them unless a strict code of behavioural observances or "approaching nicely" was followed. Hitherto, no convincing images of |kaggǝn have been found in rock art-seemingly because he is seldom seen but rather his presence felt. Now, however, a probable mantis has been found in the very locale the narrators of the customs and beliefs called their own. Furthermore, it is depicted with the allied characters of folklore, just as they had described them, among them the Hartebeest. This paper outlines the archaeological and ethnographic context of the images.
South African Archaeological Bulletin, 2024
The rock art site at Khomo Patsoa, in south-eastern Lesotho, is notable for the heterogeneity of ... more The rock art site at Khomo Patsoa, in south-eastern Lesotho, is notable for the heterogeneity of its image assemblage. Containing contributions from a range of authors, its images are executed in several distinct modes and at diverse moments in time. The site is further characterised by its striking interactions with the surrounding landscape, with aquatic features greatly influencing the composition of both individual images, particularly those of snakes, and of the site at large. The images consistently reference and depict symbolic forms of negotiation, mostly between communities of human and animal persons, although the artists extended the logics that they used to situate and relate communities of humans and non-humans relative to one another to (re)position themselves during historical moments of human/human intercultural contact. The lattermost of these imagistic negotiations comes in the form of scratched horses and ostriches, executed in a mode reminiscent of others in the Northern Cape. Far from being ‘vandalism’ or ‘graffiti’, these additions are historic signs of presence and demonstrations of identity, contributing their own signatures to a common context. The result is that the site’s layered assemblage can be read intertextually, with latter additions contextualised by, and subsequently recontextualising, earlier ones. This permits the site to be viewed as an intentional palimpsest whose constituent images act as commentaries on one another, and with the contexts and perspectives of varying authors embedded within these images themselves.
Cultures of Appropriation: Rock Art Ownership, Indigenous Intellectual Property, and Decolonisation
Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century, 2024
Both on and off the rocks, it is clear that many pictographs and petroglyphs are powerful cultura... more Both on and off the rocks, it is clear that many pictographs and petroglyphs are powerful cultural and social ‘tools’ as well as sacred beings. Indeed, in certain regions of many countries, cultural and socio-political identity is shaped, manipulated, and presented through rock paintings and engravings. In this chapter, we focus on re-contextualised and appropriated Indigenous heritage and rock art motifs, in commercial settings, in sports team mascots, and as integral components of political and national symbols—there are illuminating similarities (as well as differences) that span the globe. Case studies include instances where descendants of the original artists have re-imagined and adapted the meanings and uses of motifs, and also where non-Indigenous/non-descendant groups have appropriated rock art imagery—often without consultation with or permission from Traditional Owners and heritage managers. We offer results from fieldwork and study in North America, northern Australia, and southern Africa.
Nature Communications Earth and Environment, 2023
Investigation of Homo sapiens' palaeogeographic expansion into African mountain environments are ... more Investigation of Homo sapiens' palaeogeographic expansion into African mountain environments are changing the understanding of our species' adaptions to various extreme Pleistocene climates and habitats. Here, we present a vegetation and precipitation record from the Ha Makotoko rockshelter in western Lesotho, which extends from~60,000 to 1,000 years ago. Stable carbon isotope ratios from plant wax biomarkers indicate a constant C 3-dominated ecosystem up to about 5,000 years ago, followed by C 4 grassland expansion due to increasing Holocene temperatures. Hydrogen isotope ratios indicate a drier, yet stable, Pleistocene and Early Holocene compared to a relatively wet Late Holocene. Although relatively cool and dry, the Pleistocene was ecologically reliable due to generally uniform precipitation amounts, which incentivized persistent habitation because of dependable freshwater reserves that supported rich terrestrial foods and provided prime locations for catching fish.
The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2023
Using contemporary people as proxies for ancient communities is a contentious but necessary pract... more Using contemporary people as proxies for ancient communities is a contentious but necessary practice in anthropology. In southern Africa, the distinction between the Cape KhoeSan and eastern KhoeSan remains unclear, as ethnicity labels have been changed through time and most communities were decimated if not extirpated. The eastern KhoeSan may have had genetic distinctions from neighboring communities who speak Bantu languages and KhoeSan further away; alternatively, the identity may not have been tied to any notion of biology, instead denoting communities with a nomadic "lifeway" distinct from African agro-pastoralism. The Baphuthi of the 1800s in the Maloti-Drakensberg, southern Africa had a substantial KhoeSan constituency and a lifeway of nomadism, cattle raiding, and horticulture. Baphuthi heritage could provide insights into the history of the eastern KhoeSan. We examine genetic affinities of 23 Baphuthi to discern whether the narrative of KhoeSan descent reflects distinct genetic ancestry. Genome-wide SNP data (Illumina GSA) were merged with 52 global populations, for 160,000 SNPs. Genetic analyses show no support for a unique eastern KhoeSan ancestry distinct from other KhoeSan or southern Bantu speakers. The Baphuthi have strong affinities with early-arriving southern Bantu-speaking (Nguni) communities, as the later-arriving non-Nguni show strong evidence of recent African admixture possibly related to late-Iron Age migrations. The references to communities as "San" and "Bushman" in historic literature has often been misconstrued as notions of ethnic/biological distinctions. The terms may have reflected ambiguous references to non-sedentary polities instead, as seems to be the case for the eastern "Bushman" heritage of the Baphuthi.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2023
San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly des... more San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly destructive aspects of the colonial project. Forging new societies from heterogeneous sources, they engaged in prolonged armed insurgency, recording their exploits, presence and beliefs in the rock-art archive of the Maloti-Drakensberg. These images reference conflict and trauma, conventionally interpreted as visions of spiritual warfare. However, viewed through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), deeper dimensions emerge. PTSD is the culturally subjective experience of generalizable neuropathologies which develop following a traumatic event. Diagnosable in diverse communities worldwide, it nonetheless requires insider idioms to understand its local expressions. We explore how PTSD manifested in this historic and cultural context; how its symptomatic social dysfunctions would have been understood in forager aetiology, and how its intrusive flashbacks would have intruded on altered-state experiences induced to heal the consequences of violence. We find that the artists were not passive victims of trauma, but rather used art symbolically to reconsolidate individual and collective understandings of traumatic events.
History debunked: endeavours in rewriting the San past from the Indigenous rock art archive
Powerful Pictures: Rock Art Research Histories around the World, 2022
Rock art images are historical data in their own right – forming an archive that far pre-dates wr... more Rock art images are historical data in their own right – forming an archive that far pre-dates written texts in many regions, and far outstrips other forms of material culture in terms of potential to interpret past ontologies. Just as one learns to read text, though, the language of rock art requires an understanding of emic – inside – knowledge (whether direct or by analogy) to be truly fathomed. Knowing when images were made, however, is crucial in application to culture contact and its ramifications. Although some direct radiometric dates are starting to appear in southern Africa, it arguably makes more sense to rely on images that demonstrate contact unequivocally – cattle, sheep, horses, guns – than to speculate on an undated corpus of wild animals and human figures that runs to many thousands of years prior. Not only this but it becomes increasingly clear that essentialist tropes of San from the ethnographic present didn’t obtain in the colonial contact era, if ever they held at all. Mixed authorship, it transpires, requires alternative readings and this offering chronicles just some of the attempts to achieve better ways of applying rock art data to the past of Indigenous southern Africans.
Powerful Pictures: Rock Art Research Histories around the World, 2022
In many regions of the world, we can learn more about past societies from their rock art than fro... more In many regions of the world, we can learn more about past societies from their rock art than from any other archaeological source (e.g. Whitley et al. 2020). Rock art research opens up new vistas on Indigenous beliefs about ‘being in the world’ (e.g. David and McNiven 2018; Goldhahn 2019; Hampson 2021; Lewis-Williams 2006; McDonald and Veth 2012). That said, histories of archaeology and anthropology (e.g. Fagan 1995; Murray and Evans 2008; Willey and Sabloff 1974), often imply that until recently there were no systematic studies of rock art. Some overviews of the history of archaeology devote a page or two to rock art studies (Schnapp 1996, cf. Bahn 1998); others do not mention rock art at all (e.g. Baudou 2004; Rowley-Conwy 2007). Implicit theoretical biases within the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology have led to the privileging of stratigraphic excavation, or in the wording of Thomas Dowson (1993: 642), ‘occupational debris’. Ironically, and echoing the famous notion that ‘archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’ (Willey and Phillips 1958: 2), the implication in these histories is that archaeology is digging, or it is nothing.
Current Anthropology, 2022
The archaeological record undergoes a dramatic shift in appearance whenever indigenous peoples en... more The archaeological record undergoes a dramatic shift in appearance whenever indigenous peoples encounter incoming populations—whether in the form of economy, politics, or identity. Rock art in southern Africa testifies to successive interactions among hunter-gatherers, incoming African herders, African farmers, and, later, European settlers. New subject matter, however, is not simply incorporated into the preexisting tradition. Without exception, the many rock arts that depict novel motifs are made differently from the “traditional corpus,” usually rougher in appearance (in both paintings and engravings), more dynamic, or made with vivid and chalky paints. The drop in pigment quality is likely owing to the disruption and ultimate decimation of indigenous groups and the subsequent breakdown in trade and social communications—the Disconnect. The shifts in manners of depiction and the ways in which motifs are treated owe more, it seems, to the increasingly heterogeneous and creolizing membership of the art-producing people and the mixing of their cosmologies, albeit with specific cultural survivals. Precolonial contact images speak to a multitude of interactions and entanglements in ways that can inform the archaeological record, and colonial-era rock art constitutes a major component of the historical archive, an emic, agentive artifact that offers a reverse gaze from an indigenous perspective.
African Heritage Challenges - Communities and Sustainable Development (Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa), 2020
As an agenda for development, 'transformation' invokes the longstanding and (in South Africa) con... more As an agenda for development, 'transformation' invokes the longstanding and (in South Africa) constitutionally-supported struggle for redistributive socioeconomic rights. This contribution brings experiences from two different sorts of heritage management programmes to bear on discussions of transformation as development: the Metolong Cultural Resource Management Project associated with Lesotho's Metolong Dam, and the Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art programme as a National Research Foundation-funded academic project, both of which included capacity building components. Tracing their paths-and the expectations for heritage that they entailed-reveals where invoking heritage as a platform for capacity building too often works against the cause of empowerment. In this chapter, we disarticulate received narratives of transformation, community engagement, and development, identifying tensions and concerns that emerge in practical examples. We highlight issues surrounding credentialing trainees, knowledge production and the creation of expert/ technician divides, and recommend policies for the southern African heritage sector to address these.
Time and Mind The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, 2022
In the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa, beliefs about snakes and their representa... more In the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa, beliefs about snakes and their representations in rock art images are emblematic of hybrid histories of regional societies. The snake symbol initially represented an attempt at ‘reaching out’ as forager societies incorporated a prominent
figure in the mythologies of incoming societies into their own – a figure which became a symbolic reference to crosscultural symbiosis and admixture. Reflecting the long history of such contact, the ritual uses and ontological positions of snakes in contemporary knowledge systems of the
Maloti-Drakensberg are coherent with those of earlier societies. This offers fertile ground for novel forms of interpretation. Using contextual historic and modern ethnographic material, this paper presents a relational account of regional idioms. It dwells on the language of taming and domestication
that permeate these ethnographies, and the concern they show for the mitigation of ‘wild’, sometimes ‘monstrous’, consequences of spiritual power in the social world. Symbolic resolutions of these consequences are discernible in rock art images, particularly those of snakes, demonstrating the ritual brokerage of relations between human and non-human communities, with both forms of agency depicted in various states of ‘domestication’, bridging forager and farmer understandings of human–animal relations.
Religions: Special Issue - Art, Shamanism and Animism , 2021
With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontol... more With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontological turn’ have now been in full swing since the mid-2000s. They make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the rock arts of numerous societies, particularly in their finding that in animist societies, there is little distinction between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, the sacred and the profane. In the process, a problem of perspective arises: the perspectives of such societies, and the analogical sources that illuminate them, diverge in more foundational terms from Western perspectives than is often accounted for. This is why archaeologists of religion need to be anthropologists of the wider world, to recognise where animistic and shamanistic ontologies are represented, and perhaps where there is reason to look closely at how religious systems are used to imply Cartesian separations of nature and culture, religious and mundane, human/person and animal/non-person, and where these dichotomies may obscure other forms of being-in-the-world. Inspired by Bird-David, Descola, Hallowell, Ingold, Vieiros de Castro, and Willerslev, and acting through the lens of navigation in a populated, enculturated, and multinatural world, this contribution locates southern African shamanic expressions of rock art within broader contexts of shamanisms that are animist.
Archaeological approaches to slavery and unfree labour in Africa, Special Issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2020
The protracted colonisation of southern Africa’s Cape created
conditions of extreme prejudice and... more The protracted colonisation of southern Africa’s Cape created
conditions of extreme prejudice and violence. Slaves, the
unwilling migrants to the Cape, comprised a mixed group of
individuals from the Dutch and British colonies: people with
Malay, Malagasy, East and West African heritages. They combined
to form the labour force for the colonial project, along with
indigenous Khoe-San trafficked within an illegal domestic unfree
labour economy. Escaped or ‘runaway’ slaves joined forces with
groups of ‘skelmbasters’ (mixed outlaws), who themselves were
descended from San-, Khoe- and Bantu-speaking Africans (huntergatherers,
herders and farmers). Together, they mounted a stiff
resistance that held up the colonial advance for many decades
from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth
century. Engaging in guerilla-style warfare, they raided colonial
farms for livestock, horses and guns. The ethnogenesis of such
raiding bands is increasingly coming to the attention of
archaeologists encountering the images they made of themselves
in rock shelters, as well as the spiritual beliefs that they held in
connection with escape and protection. The ‘reverse’ or
‘entangled gaze’ provided by this painted record gives us the
perfect opportunity to view something of the slave and
indigenous resistance from outside the texts of the colonial
written record.
La colonisation prolongée du Cap d’Afrique australe créa des
conditions de préjugé et de violence extrêmes. Les esclaves,
immigrants contre leur gré, constituaient un groupe mixte
d’individus issus des colonies hollandaises et britanniques: ils et
elles étaient de descendance malaisienne, malgache, est-africaine
et ouest-africaine. Leur regroupement fournit la main-d’oeuvre du
projet colonial, aux côtés des indigènes Khoe-San victimes de la
traite au sein d’une économie illégale de travail domestique
forcé. Les esclaves évadés ou ‘fugitifs’ s’associèrent à des groupes
de ‘skelmbasters’ (hors-la-loi mixtes), eux-mêmes descendants
d’Africains de langue san, khoe et bantou (chasseurs-cueilleurs,
éleveurs et agriculteurs). Ensemble, ils montèrent une résistance
acharnée qui ralentit l’avancée coloniale pendant plusieurs
décennies, de la fin du dix-huitième siècle au milieu du dixneuvième
siècle. S’engageant dans une guerre de type guérilla,
ces groupes attaquèrent les fermes coloniales pour s’emparer de bétail, de chevaux et d’armes. L’ethnogenèse de ces groupes attire
de plus en plus l’attention des archéologues, qui découvrent dans
des abris sous roche les représentations que ces communautés se
firent d’elles-mêmes, ainsi que de leurs croyances spirituelles en
rapport avec l’évasion et la protection. Le regard ‘inversé’ ou
‘enchevêtré’ fourni par ces archives peintes offre une occasion
parfaite de discerner quelque chose de la résistance des esclaves
et des indigènes, hors du domaine des écrits coloniaux.
Time and Mind The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. Special Issue, Goldhahn, J. (ed.) Rock Art Worldings, 2019
One of the largest and weirdest anthropomorphic painted figures
in the southern African subcontin... more One of the largest and weirdest anthropomorphic painted figures
in the southern African subcontinent (re)discovered in 2015
also happens to be painted at an almost unprecedented altitude.
Located in an anomalous uplifting of cave sandstone the
painted shelter perches at 2387m in the Highlands of Lesotho.
Extremely inhospitable in winter months when snow, wind and
altitude can take temperatures below -20°C, it is postulated that
this was a summer stopping place for the San hunter-gatherers
who followed the migrating herds of eland antelope to these
rich grazing grounds. A superabundance of meat and fat translates,
in the San idiom, into a superfluity of !gi or spiritual
potency. The place, having potency, is therefore both powerful
and dangerous. Such circumstances would call for those who
have the ability to influence and utilise the supernatural –
individuals with ‘hunting magic’ – to fulfil their social responsibility
to harness such power for the benefit of all. Both desirable
and undesirable outcomes might transpire. With bulging stomach
(evoking associations of gluttony and poor resource distribution),
tusks, and three legs with clawed toes, the figure in
question may represent just such an instance of the strong ritual
specialist struggling to control excess potency in an attempt to
broker relationships with the other-than-human.
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art. , 2018
If the authorship of rock art by particular groups is assumed, the very object under study can un... more If the authorship of rock art by particular groups is assumed, the very object under study can unwittingly be falsely attributed. Our interpretations have largely failed to incorporate evidence, in the colonial era and before, for the integration, mixing, and métissage of new peoples from two or more previously different ethnic groups. The results are equally assumed—namely: that one essential group impacted on the other, and the consequent imagery is a record of this secular narrative. Contrary to these simplistic reflections, creolization emphasizes cultural resilience, subversive agency, and a theoretical usefulness that enables better understandings of the rock art of people on the far side of colonial frontiers and texts.
Journal of African Archaeology, 2018
The rock shelter Mafusing 1 was excavated in 2011 as part of the
Matatiele Archaeology and Rock A... more The rock shelter Mafusing 1 was excavated in 2011 as part of the
Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art or MARA research programme
initiated in the same year. This programme endeavours
to redress the much-neglected history of this region of South
Africa, which until 1994 formed part of the wider ‘Transkei’
apartheid homeland. Derricourt’s 1977 Prehistoric Man in the
Ciskei and Transkei constituted the last archaeological survey in
this area. However, the coverage for the Matatiele region was
limited, and relied largely on van Riet Lowe’s site list of the
1930s. Thus far, the MARA programme has documented more
than 200 rock art sites in systematic survey and has excavated
two shelters – Mafusing 1 (MAF 1) and Gladstone 1 (forthcoming).
Here we present analyses of the excavated material from
the MAF 1 site, which illustrates the archaeological component of the wider historical and heritage-related programme focus.
Our main findings at MAF 1 to date include a continuous, well
stratified cultural sequence dating from the middle Holocene
up to 2400 cal. BP. Ages obtained from these deposits are suggestive
of hunter-gatherer occupation pulses at MAF 1, with possible
abandonment of the site over the course of two millennia
in the middle Holocene. After a major roof collapse altered the
morphology of the shelter, there was a significant change in the
character of occupation at MAF 1, reflected in both the artefact
assemblage composition and the construction of a rectilinear
structure within the shelter sometime after 2400 cal. BP. The
presence of a lithic artefact assemblage from this latter phase
of occupation at MAF 1 confirms the continued use of the site
by hunter-gatherers, while the presence of pottery and in particular
the construction of a putative rectilinear dwelling and
associated animal enclosure points to occupation of the shelter
by agropastoralists. Rock art evidence shows distinct phases,
the latter of which may point to religious practices involving
rain-serpents and rainmaking possibly performed, in part, for
an African farmer audience. This brings into focus a central aim
of the MARA programme: to research the archaeology of contact
between hunter-gatherer and agropastoralist groups.
Uploads
Books and Edited Volumes by Sam Challis
Issue highlights selected topics pertaining to the varied Late Quaternary
peoples and environments of the mountains across time and space.
Articles and chapters by Sam Challis
figure in the mythologies of incoming societies into their own – a figure which became a symbolic reference to crosscultural symbiosis and admixture. Reflecting the long history of such contact, the ritual uses and ontological positions of snakes in contemporary knowledge systems of the
Maloti-Drakensberg are coherent with those of earlier societies. This offers fertile ground for novel forms of interpretation. Using contextual historic and modern ethnographic material, this paper presents a relational account of regional idioms. It dwells on the language of taming and domestication
that permeate these ethnographies, and the concern they show for the mitigation of ‘wild’, sometimes ‘monstrous’, consequences of spiritual power in the social world. Symbolic resolutions of these consequences are discernible in rock art images, particularly those of snakes, demonstrating the ritual brokerage of relations between human and non-human communities, with both forms of agency depicted in various states of ‘domestication’, bridging forager and farmer understandings of human–animal relations.
conditions of extreme prejudice and violence. Slaves, the
unwilling migrants to the Cape, comprised a mixed group of
individuals from the Dutch and British colonies: people with
Malay, Malagasy, East and West African heritages. They combined
to form the labour force for the colonial project, along with
indigenous Khoe-San trafficked within an illegal domestic unfree
labour economy. Escaped or ‘runaway’ slaves joined forces with
groups of ‘skelmbasters’ (mixed outlaws), who themselves were
descended from San-, Khoe- and Bantu-speaking Africans (huntergatherers,
herders and farmers). Together, they mounted a stiff
resistance that held up the colonial advance for many decades
from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth
century. Engaging in guerilla-style warfare, they raided colonial
farms for livestock, horses and guns. The ethnogenesis of such
raiding bands is increasingly coming to the attention of
archaeologists encountering the images they made of themselves
in rock shelters, as well as the spiritual beliefs that they held in
connection with escape and protection. The ‘reverse’ or
‘entangled gaze’ provided by this painted record gives us the
perfect opportunity to view something of the slave and
indigenous resistance from outside the texts of the colonial
written record.
La colonisation prolongée du Cap d’Afrique australe créa des
conditions de préjugé et de violence extrêmes. Les esclaves,
immigrants contre leur gré, constituaient un groupe mixte
d’individus issus des colonies hollandaises et britanniques: ils et
elles étaient de descendance malaisienne, malgache, est-africaine
et ouest-africaine. Leur regroupement fournit la main-d’oeuvre du
projet colonial, aux côtés des indigènes Khoe-San victimes de la
traite au sein d’une économie illégale de travail domestique
forcé. Les esclaves évadés ou ‘fugitifs’ s’associèrent à des groupes
de ‘skelmbasters’ (hors-la-loi mixtes), eux-mêmes descendants
d’Africains de langue san, khoe et bantou (chasseurs-cueilleurs,
éleveurs et agriculteurs). Ensemble, ils montèrent une résistance
acharnée qui ralentit l’avancée coloniale pendant plusieurs
décennies, de la fin du dix-huitième siècle au milieu du dixneuvième
siècle. S’engageant dans une guerre de type guérilla,
ces groupes attaquèrent les fermes coloniales pour s’emparer de bétail, de chevaux et d’armes. L’ethnogenèse de ces groupes attire
de plus en plus l’attention des archéologues, qui découvrent dans
des abris sous roche les représentations que ces communautés se
firent d’elles-mêmes, ainsi que de leurs croyances spirituelles en
rapport avec l’évasion et la protection. Le regard ‘inversé’ ou
‘enchevêtré’ fourni par ces archives peintes offre une occasion
parfaite de discerner quelque chose de la résistance des esclaves
et des indigènes, hors du domaine des écrits coloniaux.
in the southern African subcontinent (re)discovered in 2015
also happens to be painted at an almost unprecedented altitude.
Located in an anomalous uplifting of cave sandstone the
painted shelter perches at 2387m in the Highlands of Lesotho.
Extremely inhospitable in winter months when snow, wind and
altitude can take temperatures below -20°C, it is postulated that
this was a summer stopping place for the San hunter-gatherers
who followed the migrating herds of eland antelope to these
rich grazing grounds. A superabundance of meat and fat translates,
in the San idiom, into a superfluity of !gi or spiritual
potency. The place, having potency, is therefore both powerful
and dangerous. Such circumstances would call for those who
have the ability to influence and utilise the supernatural –
individuals with ‘hunting magic’ – to fulfil their social responsibility
to harness such power for the benefit of all. Both desirable
and undesirable outcomes might transpire. With bulging stomach
(evoking associations of gluttony and poor resource distribution),
tusks, and three legs with clawed toes, the figure in
question may represent just such an instance of the strong ritual
specialist struggling to control excess potency in an attempt to
broker relationships with the other-than-human.
Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art or MARA research programme
initiated in the same year. This programme endeavours
to redress the much-neglected history of this region of South
Africa, which until 1994 formed part of the wider ‘Transkei’
apartheid homeland. Derricourt’s 1977 Prehistoric Man in the
Ciskei and Transkei constituted the last archaeological survey in
this area. However, the coverage for the Matatiele region was
limited, and relied largely on van Riet Lowe’s site list of the
1930s. Thus far, the MARA programme has documented more
than 200 rock art sites in systematic survey and has excavated
two shelters – Mafusing 1 (MAF 1) and Gladstone 1 (forthcoming).
Here we present analyses of the excavated material from
the MAF 1 site, which illustrates the archaeological component of the wider historical and heritage-related programme focus.
Our main findings at MAF 1 to date include a continuous, well
stratified cultural sequence dating from the middle Holocene
up to 2400 cal. BP. Ages obtained from these deposits are suggestive
of hunter-gatherer occupation pulses at MAF 1, with possible
abandonment of the site over the course of two millennia
in the middle Holocene. After a major roof collapse altered the
morphology of the shelter, there was a significant change in the
character of occupation at MAF 1, reflected in both the artefact
assemblage composition and the construction of a rectilinear
structure within the shelter sometime after 2400 cal. BP. The
presence of a lithic artefact assemblage from this latter phase
of occupation at MAF 1 confirms the continued use of the site
by hunter-gatherers, while the presence of pottery and in particular
the construction of a putative rectilinear dwelling and
associated animal enclosure points to occupation of the shelter
by agropastoralists. Rock art evidence shows distinct phases,
the latter of which may point to religious practices involving
rain-serpents and rainmaking possibly performed, in part, for
an African farmer audience. This brings into focus a central aim
of the MARA programme: to research the archaeology of contact
between hunter-gatherer and agropastoralist groups.