Representation and knowledge in the prehistoric rock art of Africa

The African Archaeological Review, 2 (1984), pp. 7-35

Representation and knowledge in prehistoric rock art of Africa

W H I T N E Y D A V I S

the

Abstract

This study proposes that prehistoric rock art in Africa represents aspects of the natural and social environment which are aesthetically charged, for practical and symbolic reasons, and which are also problematic, in specific ways, for ordinary, untutored perception. Rock art functions as a medium of communication in three principal contexts. It refers to an extended network of ritual acts and beliefs, to out-of-the-ordinary perception and knowledge, and to adaptively significant local information. Rock art is therefore a particular, specialized instrument of the production process. Investigating the study of prehistoric art from art historical, archaeological, and anthropological points of view, the paper examines the ways in which the original contexts of function or meaning might be reconstituted, given the special nature and constraints of graphic representation as a mode of knowledge. Three major traditions of prehistoric rock art in Africa, the Sahara, Nile valley, and southern, are the focus of discussion and source of examples. The paper takes as a general theme the feasibility or possibility of an adequate archaeology of prehistoric knowledge.

R6sum6

La pr~sente &ude propose que l'art rupestre pr~historique en Afrique repr~sente des aspects du milieu naturel et social, exprim~s de fagon esth~tique pour des raisons pratiques et symboliques, et qui pr~sentent aussi des probl~mes particuliers face ~t une perception non instruite. L'art rupestre sert de moyen de communication dans trois contextes principaux: il fait allusion fi un r~seau compliqu& de croyances et d'actes rituels, ~t une perception et ~ des connaissances hors de l'ordinaire et ~t des renseignements locaux affectant l 'adaptation. L'art rupestre figure donc comme instrument particulier et sp&cialis~ dans le processus de production. En v~rifiant l '&ude de l 'art pr6historique des points de vue historique, archfiologique et anthropologique de l'art, l'article examine les fagons selon lesquelles les contextes originaux de la fonction ou la signification pourraient gtre reconstitu~s, selon la nature et les contraintes sp~ciales de la representation graphique comme genre de

connaissance. La discussion se centre sur trois traditions principales d 'art rupestre pr&- historique, celles du Sahara, de ta vall~e du Nil et de l'Afrique du Sud, d'o~ sont aussi tir~s les exemples. L'article a pour th~me gfin~ral la possibilit6 d'une arch~ologie mieux adapt~e ~t la reconstruction des modes de connaissance pr~historique.

8 Whitney Davis

Of course, in no society, including our own (which has come up with a number of different materialist visions of nature), can natural phenomena be reduced to their ostensible, tangible aspects alone. Wherever we look, man represents them as consisting also of forces and powers that are refractory to the senses, constituting their least visible part, although in his own eyes they are the most important part for his own reproduction. Maurice Godelier (1978a:405)

We picture facts to ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein ( 1921:2.1 )

The study of rock art has always occupied an odd position in archaeology. On the one hand,

archaeologists have recognized the importance of rock art for the reconstruction of prehistoric values, however these are construed. On the other hand, such reconstruction has

often been taken to be fruitless because it is thought to be speculative. To be sure, recent writers have stressed that any archaeological interpretation will be speculative, that is,

derived not only from empirical observations but also, and necessarily, from our own assumptions about evidence. This methodological sophistication has not, however, been

sufficient to break down a conventional belief that 'material ' and 'aesthetic' acts or objects

are somehow qualitatively different, and that only 'material ' acts and objects are the proper

subject of archaeology. An archaeologist's reluctance to make much of the evidence of rock

art, despite its potential richness, might be based merely on a suspicion of the methods of art

history, which proposes what are, arguably, reliable accounts of the 'aesthetic' thought of

alien historical cultures. Because archaeology and art history have misunderstood each other, the study of

prehistoric objects or arts has been half-hearted and its results discouraging. Various traditions of rock art in Africa have been known for a century, but only in the past fifteen

years has scholarship moved beyond the descriptive, idealistic, or speculative, and faced the

need to approach works of art as raw evidence, like any other, to be used and to be accounted for in a genuinely archaeological and anthropological analysis. Needless to say, a great deal

of what is new in the study of rock art has been learned from the investigation of other archaeological problems, other cultures, and other chronologies. I will consider the nature

and progress of this development, especially the way in which a more scientific view of the evidence has opened up suggestive lines of interpretation.

I will focus on three regions of Africa, the inner Sahara (e.g., Tassili, Tibesti), the eastern and western deserts of Egypt (e.g., Wadi Hammamat , Gebel Uweinat) and the Nile valley

itself as far south as Wadi Halfa, and the Drakensberg region of South Africa and Lesotho (once inhabited by southern San peoples). Interesting and important research has been conducted elsewhere, but these concentrations are best known and have been investigated by traditions of scholarship. Most significantly, these concentrations are associated with the most substantial and best understood archaeologies and ethnographies. I confine myself to the 'prehistoric' rock art of Africa for similar reasons, adding, of course, that prehistoric art should be interesting to the student of human evolution and expression for a number of obvious and wider reasons. It is, I think, now possible to offer a critical review of what have been proposed as the appropriate methods, issues, and conclusions of rock art

research.1 One set of conclusions, if important, has been largely negative. Four quite dominating

Representation and knowledge in the prehistoric rock art of Africa 9

themes of the existing older literature on African rock art should no longer require serious

attention, and will hardly figure in my substantive discussion. First of all, rock art has often been invoked in diffusionist accounts of culture-contact and

cultural change. In most such cases, the facts themselves are uninteresting; we want to know about the implications of the relat ion--about the circumstances in which diffusion took place. Seemingly suggested by visual comparisons between the arts of different cultures, these parallels are, often, quite imaginary. Modern archaeology now disputes any account of culture based upon deriving its traits from external sources. Modern art history reinterprets the older view that every form has a formal ancestor and that 'history' is the genealogical catalogue.

Secondly, great effort has been expended on determining the ethnic or cultural identity of the makers of the rock art found so widely throughout Africa. The archaeological attribution of rock art sometimes poses a real and pressing problem. These instances require individual, specialized analysis, beyond my present purposes. In some cases, existing attributions are insecure. I do not wish to minimize these issues, and hope to stress them by considering the cultural inherence--the cultural situation and meanings--of rock art, using relevant archaeologies and ethnographies. In an important sense, however, the 'context' of rock art is as much a matter of internal coherences as of external cultural affiliation; the archaeologist's task is by no means over when an archaeological affiliation is secured.

Thirdly, many writers on African rock art, and on early art generally, have taken individual images or entire traditions as evidence for cultural and cognitive evolution--usually for the qualities of'primitive' ways of seeing and understanding. Again, I would not wish to minimize the senses in which rock art might be genuinelypre-historic. It hardly needs to be said, nevertheless, that the technological or formal simplicity of a cultural art ifact--a work of art, a myth, a set of social rules--says nothing about the nature or significance of the work it does within a culture. In evolutionary accounts, whether they implicitly denigrate the 'primitive' or not, this context is often lost.

Lastly, I will say little about questions of artistic value as it appears to us. Naturally all of us respond to rock pictures in various individual ways; I have nothing to say on this score. More importantly, our formal critical canons shape our modes of interpretation (Mitchell 1982). We must directly confront the way in which our culture could appropriately consider an alien visual culture. Many existing interpretations of rock art, as we will see, are influenced by Romantic or Hegelian notions of the nature of Art or by Renaissance or twentieth-century conceptions of the components of a work of art. Moreover, among other aspects of interpretation, its political weight cannot be overlooked; prehistoric and primitive art has figured in living political, racial, and national debate. These considerations must be separated from our archaeological task, the reconstitution of the original situation in which works of art were taken to have meaning by those who produced them.

To condense a complicated story, students of rock art have learned, in sum, that a work of art, like any other archaeological artifact, has a meaning--both for its original users and for modern historians--only insofar as it has a particular, specifiable relation with other artifacts. So much is a truism of contemporary archaeology. What obviously distinguishes the study of prehistoric rock art from other branches of archaeology, however, is the peculiar nature of this context.

By their very nature, rock pictures on cliffs, koppies, or cave walls are rarely buried and are

lO Whitney Davis

often isolated. We have no stratigraphy, few or no archaeological associations, no extensive deposit or assemblage of artifacts. These facts might be meaningful in themselves; the isolated occurrence in the open air of rock markings by Beduin Arabs has much to do with their functions as territorial or property marks (Winkler 1947), and the lack of other evidence of human action in the deep caves of France and Spain suggests that the caves were charged with whatever significance the paintings themselves propose (Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967). Wherever stratigraphical or other associations can be made, they have been exploited for their value in dating images and effecting cultural attributions (e.g., Vaufrey 1938, Davis 1979, Phillipson 1977). But in general, the context of a rock picture is something other than its position in the archaeological assemblage; the picture is the assemblage, is the site. Given these problematic aspects of the record, there are essentially three ways in which a context for rock art has been reconstituted.

(1) The art historical context of African rock art has been variously defined. The non- petroglyphic arts of Africa have sometimes been compared with rock art. In the Sahara, for instance, certain highly formal, abstract designs are similar to common motifs in the decoration of Tuareg textiles (Fuchs 1978). In southern Africa, painted 'burial stones' present versions of the style and iconography of the developed painting tradition (Rudner 1971 ). In the absence of other evidence, the significance of such connections is unknown. Are they, as seems likely, evidence of manufacture by the same artists? Do the similarities document the transfer of meanings or functions from one medium to another?

Such connections suggest, at any rate, that rock drawing was only a part of the aesthetic production of prehistoric cultures, possibly, of course, a somewhat limited part. Although it is commonly claimed that prehistoric artists drew on rocks because this was the available medium, they probably drew on rocks because this medium accommodated certain specialized purposes. These considerations raise a number of questions. Should we seek out stylistic or 'structural' unities in the entire production of a culture? Claude L~vi-Strauss (1963), S. J. Tambiah (1969), Pierre Bourdieu (1971), and others have argued that even simple motifs or design preferences--a kind of pairing, a mandala- -may represent the 'structural' constants of social organization, religious belief, or cosmographic speculation. Repeated in various media, from tatooing and costuming to painting or village planning, these representations have significance as maps of a reality. No doubt interpretation can be enriched by a sense of the way in which a culture typically organized its experience (for rock art, see especially Maddock 1970). Nonetheless, art historians often stress the possibility that different, even contradictory meanings are explored in different media. A mature aesthetic culture is a patchwork of competing, counterthrusting representations, and analysis might maintain distinctions between, say, 'high' and 'low' art, 'private' or 'public' imagery, 'sacred' or 'profane' objects, or 'academic' and 'avant-garde' styles.

For most prehistoric African cultures our documentation is inadequate to the task of tracing out these fundamental relations. Only in the case of ancient Egypt do we know the place of dynastic rock art in the culture as a whole, and the relations--stylistic, iconographic, and even functional--between rock art and contemporary arts of pottery decoration, textile manufacture, wall and tomb painting, and so on. However, genuinely prehistoric art in the Nile valley, earlier than the middle of the fourth millennium bc, still remains virtually without art historical context (Davis n.d.). The earliest rock drawings in the Nile valley might be associated stylistically with a few puzzling, fragmentary decorations from early


pottery and ostrich eggshells, but these connections only establish elementary affiliations. As documentation of this kind is so limited, archaeologists have ranged more widely in

seeking out art historical parallel and association. The petroglyphic traditions of non-African cultures, particularly of Australia and the American Southwest, were once compared much more frequently with the African traditions than is usual today. For Australia, for instance, it appeared that anthropologists could effectively document a belief that an image was invested with power (Levine 1957). It has proved, of course, that a formula of this kind is only as useful as the details it comprehends; the particular way in which an image is believed to have what kinds of powers has a specific, and variable, constitution within each culture. Modern studies of Australian iconography (Strehlow 1971, Munn 1973) are penetrating precisely because they comprehend the individual details of a single ethnography. Nonetheless, when images or the functions of images are decoded elsewhere, African archaeology must review its own list of standing concerns.

Both empirical and methodological insights have been due, haphazardly, to cross-cultural comparison, but fundamental problems still obtain. General texts often treat all rock arts as comparable (e.g., Brentjes 1969). Although all rock arts share a single medium, it is more problematic, of course, that they necessarily share particular representational or ideological functions. Any effort to narrow the range of comparison, to eliminate irrelevancies and false associations, must be applauded. The most provocative attempts to constitute a real art historical.context for African rock art have been historians' ambitious associations of the rock art of the Spanish Levant, northern Italy, the Mediterranean littoral, and Africa with Franco-Cantabrian palaeotithic cave painting of the Solutrean and Magdatenian eras. ~

Palaeolithic cave art is notoriously baffling and interpretation notoriously insecure. We know that the art of the deep caves in France and Spain well antedates the earliest principal manifestations of rock art in Africa, which, as a general approximation, I will date after the tenth millennium bc. 3 Formal and iconographic continuities have been traced. Artists in both traditions, for instance, concentrate on the outlines of figures; figures tend to be placed centrally in vaguely defined fields; peculiar patterns of superimposition and 'composition' seem to be maintained; the artists were intensely interested in certain animals, in pairings or relations between animalS, and, apparently, also in particular interactions between animals and human beings. Such similarities seem to justify the view that the art of Lascaux and Altamira is ancestral, in a chronological or functional sense, or both, to the rock art of Africa.

This 'history' of African rock art is almost certainly false. The late upper palaeolithic and neolithic technologies of Africa have little direct relation with the supposedly ancestral technologies ofpalaeolithic Eurasia, and represent the local evolution of indigenous cultures. Formal comparisons between palaeolithic and African cave or rock art have been much too general. Recent innovative studies of palaeolithic art itself, proposed by Andr6 Leroi- Gourhan and his followers, have stressed the significance of the environmental or topo- graphic context--not merely the situation of paintings in deep caves, unparalleled in Africa, but also situations within caves on specific kinds of walls and surfaces (Leroi-Gourhan 1967, 1982; Ricol 1973). If Leroi-Gourhan's most important hypotheses are even broadly correct (see Stevens 1975 and Parkington 1969 for specific doubts), the cave paintings are rule- governed in the highest degree, which is to say, ultimately, that their 'language' of pairings, opposition, classification, and symbol, possibly sexual, reflects the conceptual interests of a particular culture, with very individual information and experience at its disposal. Although

12 Whitney Davis

we should certainly be willing to learn from Leroi-Gourhan that African rock art, or any primitive art, might be rule-governed in similarly exact ways, the argument at this level obviously does not commit us to any conclusions about historical continuities or relations of influence.

The 'art historical' context of rock art, then, must be sought within the domain of the culture itself, including its traditions of artistic practice in various media, where these can be reconstructed, and depending on an account of its material and conceptual behavior. My second and third modes of reconstituting the context of rock art are both important, but in some ways largely unfulfilled, efforts to retrieve this cultural context.

(2) Most obvious and appealing is the compilation of what we might call the ethnography of artistic production. Who, precisely, made the rock pictures, and what do we know of their motives or the meanings they sought to mark down? It is fortunate that in a few, dramatic cases we have been able, more or less directly, to question or scrutinize living members of 'stone age' cultures engaged in making or looking at rock pictures. Parallels for aspects of the art of the Saharan massifs are perhaps to be found in living sub-Saharan agriculturalist societies like the Fulani (Dieterten 1966); the Dogon of Mall produce rock pictures with a rich mythic and ritual context (Griaule 1950). The modern cultures of Upper Egypt and the Sudan, especially the Dinka and Nuer of the Sudanese Nile or the Shilluk, whose institutions are so often compared to those of pharaonic Egypt, have been thought in some respects to resemble early pastoral peoples of the Nile, known to us archaeologically in the Egyptian predynastic cultures (Hoffman 1979) or as the Nubian 'C-Group' of the Egyptian dynastic period (Trigger 1965). Although the story is complicated, some fraction of rock art in the Nile valley was produced by settled, pastoralist or agriculturalist cultures, continuously from the fourth millennium to at least the Roman invasions. The modern populations do not, as far as we know, produce rock art, but many of the subjects and details of ancient drawings are instantly recognizable to anyone who knows the modern technologies or habits (Hornell 1937). The developed art and writing of ancient Egypt are quite directly descended from the prehistoric art of northeast Africa. Although known Egyptian practices in art and known Egyptian symbols, mythological or otherwise, have been improperly invoked to explain distant images in the inner Sahara or equatorial Africa, more cautious equations between prehistoric, pharaonic, and modern cultures in northeast At¥ica can be revealing. What we know about ancient Egyptian life and modern Nilotic anthropology can be deployed in the study of prehistoric drawings. In southern Africa, at least one systematic, reliable ethnography has been compiled. The modern !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert (Lee and DeVore t976; Lee 1979;, Marshall 1976; Tobias 1978) and the now vanished/Xam San (Lewis- Williams 198ta:25-34) are closely related to the southern San populations in the stone age (Wilton/Smithfield) traditions, who actually survived, as the 'Bushmen' of an earlier anthropolog5 ~, into the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century reports and recent study of the Kalahari San have been combined in vigorous anthropological interpretations of southern San rock art by Patricia Vinnicombe (1976) and J. D. Lewis-Williams (t 981a).

Ethnographic analogies must be tested on a case-by-case basis, and even if we possess a detailed ethnography there is no guarantee that we will learn anything useful about art- making, the perception and use of images, or, most importantly, the implicit modes of thought which animate social life in all its material and aesthetic aspects. The evidence of ethnography, like the evidence of images themselves, must be subject to analytic reorganiza-


tion, evaluation, and interpretation. Traditional social anthropologies have so little interested themselves in the visual arts that we are not yet in command of a fully convincing strategy of study. Despite these difficulties, no amount of conventional stylistic analysis--the erection of 'art histories' in some abstract domain of forms and formal relations--could compete with the power of even a limited ethnography in grappling with the most significant

issues. What did the makers of images think they were doing, or hope to achieve, and what was constraining or determining in their perception, thought, and work?

(3) Although answers may be sought in fragmentary ethnographies, these questions have been most usefully focussed by considering sequences of rock pictures in themselves. This third mode of reconstituting the context of rock art proceeds by isolating the coherences of sequences of individual images--by attempting, to put the matter another way, to establish the visual "grammar' within which any individual image operates as a particular 'sentence'. Based on a linguistic model, this strategy of analysis has, of course, been characteristic of the study of all archaeological and ethnographic arts; when cultural contexts are flimsy or lost, we must work with what we have, namely, the images themselves. Here, archaeologists confront a concept with which they have conventionally been uncomfortable; in senses to be considered, the context of an image is its style.

In modern art historical and archaeological usage, style is principally a statistical concept, a statement of the probability of relationship. Work x- -a stone toot, a painted pot, a rock picture--is said to be in a different style than work y when the actions involved in its production, including, most problematically, the private 'thoughts' of the maker, are different. As no sequence of actions could be repeated by human agents in exactly the same way every time, we consider a tolerance of variation in classifying works as having the same or different styles. Working out these tolerances--to establish artifact 'types' or artistic 'styles'--is in itself a difficult business; we may have no means of knowing whether the actions of producing works x andy were the same. Furthermore, in normal usage stylistic classifications are understood to involve correlations between similar-looking (or similarly measured) objects and certain extra-formal facts about these objects. Thus, if we say that works x andy are in the same style, we could be taken to mean that works x andy were made by the same artist, are the work of artists of similar social affiliation, are dated to the same period, and so on. Clearly, a great number of such correlations could be articulated. We must always come to an explicit statement of the correlations in which we happen to be interested. It might make perfect sense, for example, to say that an Egyptian drawing and a modern architectural blueprint have a similar 'style', but this correlation is one in which an archaeologist might be uninterested. Unclarity at this level has confused much writing about prehistoric and primitive art and is at least in part to blame for the view, widely shared by many 'dirt ' archaeologists, that the archaeology of style is impossibly subjective.

It should be obvious that a proper understanding of artistic styles depends upon at least two elementary variables, first, the availability of a comprehensive or at least representative sample, and second, what might be called the sensitivity or appropriateness of the criteria by which classifications and comparisons are made. Both variables have been much mishandled in the study of prehistoric rock art in Africa and elsewhere.

Ideally, one scrutinizes every instance of an image reasonably thought to belong to a single historical culture or stylistic tradition. In the past, however, most writers were content to single out striking, dramatic, or peculiar images, images in the best condition for publication,

14 Whitney Davis

'beautifiJl' images. Even now, it is difficult to escape the temptation to characterize a style, and by implication a culture, by referring to a small selection of the most 'characteristic' images. Lateiy, as part of the revolution in archaeology generally, students of rock art have understood the need to record completely and accurately; not only are many actual works threatened with obliteration, but also some important facts about rock art only come to light when the totality of production is reviewed. In the Nile valley, the Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia recorded all rock drawings in a concession at the second cataract of the Nile, in perhaps the most exemplary publication of its kind in north-east African archaeology (Hellstr6m 1970). Every drawing was photographed and redrawn in line; all sites were located on detailed maps; each surface was briefly described; every figure was assigned to a category in extensive classifications both of subjects and of techniques; aspects of technique, the quality of the surface, elevation, and siting were noted for each case; archaeological associations with the neolithic 'A-Group' and other Nubian cultures were recorded (see Nordstr6m t972; Huard 1972; Kemp 1976). In southern Africa, to take a second example, Pager (1971), following the pioneering efforts of Vinnicombe (t 967) and Maggs (1967), recorded all the paintings in shelters in the Ndedema River gorge in the Drakensberg, in a monumental photographic and descriptive survey; as with the SJE reports, aspects of siting not often included in more summary considerations were reviewed. Other investigators in southern Africa have attempted to be similarly comprehensive on a more modest scale or for a smaller region.

Many lessons about research method and about rock art itself have been assimilated. Like any human interference in the world, rock pictures are not situated randomly in the environment; different kinds of pictures, techniques, or themes are associated with particular land formations, kinds of accessible or inaccessible places, and so on. As these associations might be significant, we must know not only what an image looks like but also where it is in the landscape and in relation to other pictures near and far away. In the Nile valley, for instance, it appears that younger drawings were placed lower on the cliffs, which may be due partly to the level of the Nile flood and partly to the culture's slowly evolving interest in the agricultural life of the river's edge instead of the hunting ways of the high desert (Davis 1977, 1978). In southern Africa, paintings and engravings are, it seems, differentially distributed in the veld, associated with different landforms and movements of the regional fauna, and even at a single rock art site, stylistic and thematic interests may shift from surface to surface as one moves over the koppie or in the cave shelter (Butzer et aI. 1979). Some of these variations might reflect evolutionary trends. Archaeologists in southern Africa have begun to undertake comprehensive studies of the 'spatial distributions of motifs as partial records of prehistoric

settlement' (Manhire et al. 1983; Mazel 1983). The problem, then, is to organize and assess this new mass of information. The sheer bulk

and richness of a record of this kind may, as often with primitive and ancient arts, conceal a very high degree ofinvariance between individual images in the long sequence. Much of the information might therefore be abbreviated and quantified. Our aims might be various; we might wish to build up a typology of images, hoping this reflects the chronological evolution of a style, or we might wish to locate the boundaries of a culture's mode of representation, in order to distinguish it from others and examine its internal system. In any case, we must find ways by which individual images can be classified, hoping, here, that our ordering will somehow inform us about original functions or meaning.


In the reconstruction of prehistoric systems of representation, a number of substantive and

methodological issues present themselves. Although we know that an entire sequence of images must be canvassed, it is not clear what the units of a system of representation might be - -and therefore what our units of analysis should be.

Some students of rock art build up classifications or a description of a 'style' by beginning with single figures, and simply count the number of times particular subjects, techniques, or motifs appear in the sequence. Analysis of this kind is appropriate in answering only certain questions. In southern Africa, counting of this kind definitively established an important fact, namely, that southern San rock pictures are overwhelmingly concerned with the image of the eland, although we know the etand was not necessarily the only or most important element in the San environment or diet (Vinnicombe 1972a, 1972b, 1975; Pager 1971). For the Nile valley, similar observations have been made possible. Unfortunately, in the Sahara no comprehensive surveys of this kind have been undertaken; consequently, interpretations have been partial and insecure.

It is clear, however, that the units of our classifications might be otherwise defined. A single figure in a rock picture--abstract, animal, or human-- is already a complex synthesis of details. Stylistic criticism traditionally concentrates on these details--the way in which individual lines and features are drawn-- to establish subtle similarities or differences between images. It is significant, for instance, that the eland in San rock art is sometimes presented walking or trotting and sometimes 'falling' or 'dying'. We need to be sensitive to the different meanings attached to different ways of handling the same basic form. Recent art historical research has especially emphasized the fact that the members of a given culture are highly educated in, and sensitive to, such nuances, which an alien observer can barely detect (e.g. Baxandall 1972). 'Meaning', in fact, partly resides for the viewer in the relation--one might almost say theplay--between an image presented and some ideal or schema for image- making already known to users (Gombrich 1960). In the Nile valley during dynastic times, we can measure the nearness of a drawing to, or its distance from, the formal canons of Egyptian art, which regulate the organization of details within a contour and their relative proportions (Davis 1983). Here, it is important that we be able to determine whether a rock picture is significantly canonical, and therefore likely to have been produced by a knowledge- able craftsman for specific purposes, or provincial, experimental, satirical, or otherwise non- or even anti-canonical.

More problematically, the significant units of a system of representation might be some large association of forms. Interpretation of the paintings of Tassili and Tibesti has often proceeded on the assumption that such 'compositions' or 'narratives' can be recognized by a modern observer, almost, it seems, intuitively (e.g. Frobenius 1937; Tschudi 1956). Many readings of this kind cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, since we have no non-pictorial evidence. It can be said, though, that a large proportion of these readings are too dependent upon specifically Western conceptions of the pictorial field or of the nature of narrative and story-telling in graphic media. The weight of contemporary archaeological opinion is against accepting this approach as sufficiently scientific (Monod t963:186; Smith 1968:21). The difficulty, paradoxically, is not so much that such reconstructions are fanciful, but rather that artists always deploy various formal devices to create patterns and associations, to which we can be 'naturally' sensitive without, of course, knowing their import.

Figures gesture at each other; figures are placed symmetrically around an axis; motifs are

16 Whitney Davis

introduced repetitively throughout a design; certain figures are always paired with one kind of other figure and never with other kinds--we can attempt, at least, to describe this elaborate syntax, this pictorial logic, for which we will later attempt to locate a semantic, a set of actual references.

For most traditions of African rock art, a comprehensive analysis of this syntax has not been attempted. The nature of association has been examined only in cases which seem obvious, to our eyes, or specially marked by the artist himself. It is an important peculiarity of prehistoric, primitive, and archaic arts-- 'conceptuat ' arts, as they are misleadingly called - - t h a t the image itself actually marks the meaningful connections between things. Lewis- Williams (1981 b) has convincingly shown that the meandering red line in southern San rock pictures, connecting various human and animal figures, refers to the interpenetration of their natures and powers, as a line of 'supernatural potency'; other markings may denote 'out-of- the-body travel'. In the dynastic rock art of Egypt, association is rigorously marked by drawing groundlines or register-lines beneath separate figures (Davis 1976). Even in the earliest hunting art of the deserts of northeast Africa, peculiar lines connect hunters and animals, perhaps representing traps or lassoes, as has been proposed, or indicating some intangible order of association (Winkler 1938-39; Dunbar 1941).

The superimposition of separate figures seems m be a pre-eminent instance of this tactic, the literal marking of intangible, metaphorical associations. Long thought to be the random accumulation of an extended evolution, superimposition in the palaeolithic caves and on some rocks of Africa now appears to be, often, a deliberate and immediate strategy of representation (Leroi-Gourhan 1982:20-24; Lewis-Williams t972, 1974). French archaeologists based an elaborate, many-phased chronology of Saharan rock art on patterns of superpositioning, as the 'stratigraphy' of a painted rock surface (e.g., Ripotl-Perello 1964); although there is as yet to my mind no reason to reject the chronological conclusions, it is, to echo an earIier comment, a specifically Western assumption that an artist should intend his image to be unobscured by other markings, whether contemporary or later. Superimposi- tions and 'transparencies' can be used to represent the relations between things; they should be taken at fhce value and read literally: an infant is 'in' its parent or an animal 'in' its herd, a man and an animal 'share' the same space, or a single creature has distinguishable but linked aspects. As Siegfried Giedion (1960) recognized in his remarkable study of the pictorial field in palaeolithic art, the early artists understood the spatial continuum in terms entirely different from those the Western tradition has investigated; where we arrange the intervals between objects according to a knowledge of space as a three-dimensional volume of separate points, the early artist was committed to no such science, and, by implication, seems to have regarded space as multiple, in-folding, and simultaneously empowered or inhabited by a number of entities. His images may pack into a single connected set of lines an enveloping,

layered space. It should be clear, I hope, that the reconstruction of the syntax of representation is

somewhat different from the quantification of facts about a given sequence of images. Whichever strategy we employ, and both are useful in individual ways, we want, ultimately, to move beyond the patterns or quantities to problems of meaning. At the present time, we can only make sense of the grossest configurations of a prehistoric style. We must be alert to the dangers; it might be precisely the anomalous, in some statistical sense, which requires our best attention. An artifact may be a symbol, but a symbol is not necessarily an artifact. How


do we specify the relations between the two, and move from the one to the other? The study of

an archaeological art relies upon two important characteristics of the material itself in the

resolution of this question. Whatever else it might happen to be or to do, a rock picture

represents or refers, and incorporates rules--a standard of values and of practice, an 'aes- the t i c ' - -by which representation is taken to be competent in the business of reference.

The intricacies of representational reference have always intrigued art historians and

philosophers, and our puzzlements are compounded by the fact that masterful artists are likely to exploit the inherent ambiguities of representation for further ends of artifice, as rock

artists recognize, for instance, when they endow a single tlne with multiple references. I f we are ever to make sense of prehistoric images, some common fallacies must be isolated and some first principles negotiated.

An anthropologist or art historian soon realizes that the relation between the world as it is represented in an art or language and the world 'as it really is' has many peculiar qualities. There exists no single, simple, direct way in which the world is 'naturally ' perceived,

innocently or purely, and then translated into art or language (Gombrich 1960; Gibson 1966; Goodman 1971, Gombrich et al. 1972; Wollheim 1980). Representation is largely conventional, a matter of consensus and culture. Recognizing this, we might then go on to argue that

in certain cultural environments of information and experience, some modes of representation are more natural, that is, most accessible, most easily understood, most fulfilling of

various purposes. For many years, of course, 'primitive' art was interpreted in tacit comparison with some fantastical ideal of representational naturalism, legibility, or truth.

Even now, particularly among structuralist writers, the arbitrariness of representation is held to reproduce the specific arbitrariness of a culture's mode of perception and cognition. Without making this extraordinary leap of inference, we can say, however, that a mode of representation is selective in its analysis of experience and in the preservation of its conclusions

in images. From what we assume is a vastly more extended set of human experiences, a mode of representation selects certain features to be marked down. Representation, the location of

words and images for available information and experience, is one kind offilter in the flow of information and experience. As a first approximation, let us say that an art selects for representation the aesthetically charged aspects of the environment, and that these aspects

acquire this charge, become interesting to a culture and its artists, for specifiable reasons.

The problem &pr imi t ive totemism is in some ways quite like our concern here with the prehistoric artist 's selection of particular nataral or other phenomena for representation in art. The matter is far too complex for a detailed review here, but the two questions are, I suggest, substantively interrelated. What, in general, are the sources of reference? 'How may

it be explained', L6vi-Strauss (1962:85) asks, ' that social groups, or segments of society, should be distinguished from each other by the association of each with a particular natural species?' Similarly, why, for instance, does southern San rock art focus so intently upon the eland, or the image of the eland? One direction of explanation, by now classic, and notorious, proposes, in the words of Radcliffe-Brown (1951:116), that ' the world of animal life is represented in terms of social relations similar to those of human society'. As we will see, the

selection of images apparently does have a great deal to do with what social life is conceived to be. Behind what the image is directly a representation of, with which the image is continuous or to which it is transparent, 'laid against reality', in the words ofWittgenstein ( 1921:2.1512),

18 Whitney Davis

'like a measure', there is, then, a world of social facts and knowledge to which the image refers. 4

The analysis of the intentions of an artist and the function of his production does not, by any means, exhaust the senses in which a work of art has a meaning, but for anthropologists and historians this type of analysis seems, at least, to be one first order of business. It will be remembered that our archaeological task is the reconstruction of the situation in which a work of art was taken to have meaning by those who produced and used it. For the moment, let us admit capaciousness in our definitions; neither intentions nor functions, meanings, are necessarily known consciously by artists and users, and there may be ways, isolated for us by Marxist or Freudian critics in particular, in which meanings are by definition unrecognized or unconscious. 5 The full armament of archaeological analysis--the various art historical, ethnographic, stylistic, and statistical approaches I have reviewed--is required in the excavation of these meanings.

Without interviewing an artist in a systematic way, we really have no secure sense of what his individual intentions, his 'motivations', might have been. It is by now accepted in the study even of arts for which we possess a richer documentation that we must distinguish between motivation and meaning (e.g. Baxandall 1972:2). Individual motivation is as complex as the work of art itself. We do not know exactly why, for example, a Greek patron might have dedicated a victory-statue of an Olympic champion; did he wish to memorialize his lover? to glorify his ownpolis? to show off his knowledge of the best work, the best artists? to make atonement for transgressions? Presumably his motivations were some complex synthesis of these and other considerations. We may usefully think of the meanings of a work, however, as the form in which individual motivations tbr production were thinkable and possible, for a given individual in the culture at a given point in time. The meaning of the victory-statue--for our purposes--resides in the fhct that the culture provided reasons and mechanisms, and the arts provided themes and forms, by and through which such motivations could be fulfilled.

As the intentions of an artist or user seem to be private and complicated, and accessible only through public languages, actions, and forms, archaeologists and anthropologists have understandably come to emphasize the public qualities or social role of a work of art. This development in our research represents the coming-of-age of social anthropology in the humanistic disciplines, or, perhaps more precisely, represents the acquisition of the tools of social science by professional students of the humanities.

It is certainly worth noting, I think, that in the study of archaeological arts this development has not been an easy or an uncontested one. Many writers still assume or assert that the anthropologist's focus on cultural meanings--often simple, often sordid, often peculiar--deprives the work of art, and its modern viewer (or collector), of something of its individual complexity, mysteriousness, and sanctity. Many students of rock art are unwilling to conclude that rock pictures were produced for any reasons other than the pure 'aesthetic' pleasure to be had from drawing and looking (e.g. Willcox 1963; Rudner and Rudner t970). We are not even told exactly what the aesthetic effect might have been for an original maker or viewer; quality is transcendent, and art speaks across the centuries in an unproblematic manner.

We would do well, however, to recognize more legitimate objections to the thrust of anthropological interpretation. For many art historians and critics, it is precisely an artist's


reworking of a tradition or reorientation of accepted meanings- -an artist 's non-belonging in a

cul ture--which is of prime interest, is, indeed, the fundamental character of art and its source

in our biological and social being. On the whole, the student of prehistoric art can sidestep

this problem, for it is yet a fhrther peculiarity of prehistoric, primitive, and archaic arts that they should be so social, their achievement and meanings measured by an extraordinarily

dominating cultural consensus which infrequently permits significant deviation. I t is a late modern conception, of course, that there exists a domain of Art in which the representation, expression, or exemplification of qualities is a matter of a personal, creative manipulation.

The student of rock art is much more likely to be impressed by the formalization and

standardization of images than by their variations or idiosyncracies. I t has also been said that the archaeological or anthropological scrutiny of art amounts to

no more than a vulgar, banal historicism, functionalism, or determinism (see recently the

debate provoked by Lewis-Williams t 982). In practice, it is difficult to escape this charge, for an archaeological account will necessarily simplify, seek out the most identifiable constants,

or attend to those features which can be counted and indexed. In theory, however, our accounts need not lose a sense of the compelling wholeness and complexity of social life and art in attending to their particular features and relations.

The thrust of recent research, I suggest, is to describe a rock-picture as a communication within a particular functional complex. 6 The picture, the artifact, is the symbol which effects the communication, sometimes in conjunction with other acts, and it is also, for us as

archaeologists, the symbol of this history having occurred. I have already attended briefly to the character of the communicat ion-- to questions of artistic context, style, and representation, the selective marking of aspects of cultural experience. We may now add that the

functional complex in which this selective marking is active, well-formed or 'meaning-full ' , is a set of social facts, including the immediate and intended functions of a work of art, its ultimate or real functions, its maker 's traditions or perceptual and artistic skills, and the import, of course, of what it is that is represented in art and of the way in which representation is carried out.

The immediate operations of rock pictures throughout Africa, where these can be reconstructed, are various, and vary from culture to culture. Some proposed functions are

quite obvious, and although they need not be called into question, they are not sufficiently

interesting for extended review here. Many pictures must be merely scribbling or doodling; motivation or meaning is either simple or idiosyncratic. Such pictures are recognized by their stylistic crudity and deviation from the overall norms of a sequence. Even these images can be pressed into some service; overtly erotic or scatological imagery documents concerns to which we often have no other access, and it is axiomatic that we want to know the outer limits of art-making, the crude, free-form, or individual as much as the routinely competent. Some simple designs are territorial emblems or route-markers. I will return to a more elaborated version of this function, but note here and pass on from a body of straightforward signposts of this type.

Some rock-paintings in the Sahara, the Nile valley, and the south appear to be rather simply conceived, direct representations of a specific historical event, although the actual value of the image, as a record, commentary, teaching aid, or even a politicized reworking of the facts, is not precisely understood. The number of such images is fairly small. Other historical arts, including our own, have been far more subservient to the demands of story-

20 Whitney Davis

telling or record-making than the rock art of Attica, and in fact, it might be argued that other media of thought, chiefly oral and literary, satisfy these particular demands in the cultures under review. An archaeologist or historian who wishes to use the rock art of Africa in some direct reconstruction of historical events, like migrations or conflicts, will be greatly disappointed; work of this kind must depend principally on the facts of distribution and relative chronology (Cooke 1965; Lhote 1970). Unfortunately, as with the developed arts of ancient Egypt and the Near East, supposedly narrational representations have been thought to represent actual events, or, more generally, the 'structure' of events, and are used as a kind of archaeological evidence for political history or social economy.

It is enormously tempting to see a figurative image as representing, unproblematically, something that an artist might really have seen or might really do, to take the 'realism' of the image or even its symbols for things as reliable or representative documents of 'real life', but this temptation--which has tremendously distorted interpretation at many levels--must be thoroughly purged, indulged only in limited and appropriate circumstances. The striking naturalism of form or the dramatic flair for narration in many African rock pictures do not necessarily imply that the pictures are intended, in any way, as a faithful likeness of things in the 'real world', to be received, naively, as such. A work of art is not necessarily even a generalized 'map' or 'model' of the activities and structure of a society, nor does it always pretend to be so, although it might be a perfectly adequate instantiation of certain particular social concerns. 'Reality' for art, as I have said, and the reality of the material world, however this is in turn perceived or understood, are not easily correlated, and it is, I believe, one of the paradoxical ends of art itsetfto make possible knowledge of some kinds of worlds and realities not otherwise, normally and non-aesthetically, known to members of the culture (see generally Goodman 1975). Despite these important caveats, however, it probably would be fair to describe a proportion of all rock art as memorial or commemorative in nature and function, recognizing that although no actual events may be represented, types and aspects of actual events are marked down in general, emblematic, 'abstract' ways. In turn, the significance of such memorialization might vary widely. I will return to proposals that rock pictures preserve some of the powers of the beings they represent, or that images constantly remind viewers of ideologically significant events and experiences.

Traditional interpretation has proposed two other functions for African rock art which would make some sense of a greater number of images. For one reason or another, however, these interpretations cannot be sustained. In the first place, rock drawings or paintings have often been seen, as I have already mentioned, as the production of well-formed or beautiful images, as aesthetic activity as such, to be understood and admired as such by contemporary users and modern viewers al ike-- l ' art pour l'artl Anthropologically informed research moves far beyond this naive interpretation, and several recent writers have launched rebuttals devastating enough to require no rehearsal here (Vinnicombe 1972a, 1972b; Lewis-Williams t981a, 1982, 1983). We may readily grant that a rock picture is well-formed or beautiful, but only in relation to a specifiable system of tastes and preferences, functions and meamngs.

In the second place, the most widely popular interpretations of rock ar t--proposed in most general textbooks on primitive art or the history of ar t - -have identified its function as the 'magical' manipulation of the material or spiritual world through the production of images. All palaeolithic and primitive arts have given rise to this interpretation, and it is not, I hasten to add, a negligible or obviously wrong-headed one--depending on the details of our


formulation and on the archaeological evidence. Some formulations of this interpretation are much less secure than others.

It was long believed that prehistoric artists, who, after all, were probably not full-time craft specialists, produced drawings as magical aids in carrying out their other daily and presumably most significant activities, like hunting or gathering food (Frobenius 1931; Obermaier and Kuhn 1930; Brentjes 1969). One drew a wounded predator; magically, the beast would succumb in an actual hunt. One painted a large herd of fat, healthy animals; magically, the herds one pursued would actually be rich, would increase. One actually killed a valuable creature; in drawing, another would be magically restored to nature. Each of these functions--which are possibly exclusive of one another--has been thought to explain rock art.

Many assumptions of early twentieth-century and older anthropology are wrapped up in these initially appealing formulations. We are perhaps not so willing now to attribute obviously naive, superstitious, or counter-'scientific' thoughts to prehistoric or primitive art ists--now that we know, for instance, how accurate, detailed, and sophisticated primitive zoological and botanical classifications and observations can be (e.g. L6vi-Strauss 1966;

Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976). The extraordinary naturalism of a palaeolithic cave drawing or African rock picture might be due as much to an intense desire to preserve this rich empirical knowledge as to a desire to have things, magically, be other than they really are. Furthermore, in the supposed operation of this magic the status of the image itself has never been successfully determined. Is the image a supplication to other powers, a prayer which represents what is wanted? Is the act of making an image so powerful in itself that the work of art, the artifact, is the effective magic, like a curative dance or medical philtre? Represen- tations may have power-- they may bring the world under control--but do we really believe that artists and users fundamentally identified, or confused, an image and its referent? Do we assume that our own rather evolved and particular notions of illusion and fiction, and their powers to make the world over into another shape, can be generalized to account for

prehistoric images? It is interesting to note that in cultures which do identify the image with its referent, everyone is routinely conscious of the fact that the image is not, in the ordinary run, the real thing; images must be animated or 'operationalized' in sequences of ritual action, by the addition or acquisition of a 'name', and so on. In ancient Egypt, before the sculpted grave-image became the living soul on earth, the living ka, it was animated in the 'ritual of opening the mouth' (Morenz 1973:150-56). Before the image became the soul, needless to say, it was inanimate matter which merely represented--a different function altogether, although not a negligible one in itself (Davis 1983). The evidence for African rock art suggests that much the same was true. The actions of individuals who take the image to be magically continuous or identical with its referent--where a hunter throws a spear at a picture in order, presumably, to influence his chances in the chase--are explicitly reported as naive; the cases involve individuals who did not really know what the pictures were supposed to be or to do (see, e.g., Lewis-Williams 1977). We do have archaeological or ethnographic evidence for the use of rock art in ritual action, but no good evidence, apart from the assertion of some modern commentators, that the drawings were in an immediate and simple way a form of 'hunting magic' or 'fertility magic'.

A crushing blow to this Frazerian interpretation of African rock art has been dealt, of course, by the quantitative analysis of the thematic content of rock-drawings. In the Nile

22 Whitney Davis

valley, artists were attentive to a great range of subjects. In the earlier, pre-dynastic phases, artists depict the animals we know they hunted, but the palaeoenvironments as represented in rock art (Winkler 1938-39; Dunbar 1941; Resch 1967) and as documented in hunters' camps or settlement middens are not coextensive. Hunters represented the antelope, to be sure, but also jackals and hyenas, snakes and scorpions, crocodiles and tortoises, fish, weapons, traps, and, possibly, celestial phenomena. In the later phases, agriculturalists represent their domesticated cattle, but also rare and dangerous game, many minor elements of the flora and fauna, and at this stage, importantly, a whole new range of human subjects, boats, °dancers' or 'mourners', even battle and conflict (cf. Esperandieu 1952 and Camps- Fabrer 1961-62 for the pastoral art of the Sahara). At all times the drawings of what was hunted or cultivated are mixed in with representations of many other aspects of the local and the supernatural environment. There are, however, definite boundaries to the thematic interests of northeast African rock artists, fairly stated by the range of theme in the canonical Egyptian style--the leader in majesty, the deceased contemplating his goods and affairs, the action of the hunt, the inspection of the servants, animals, and lands of a village or an estate (Davis 1983). But this range of theme maps a far more extensive and complex territory than an artist's interests in elementary material requirements. Even more dramatically, in South Africa, as I have had occasion to mention, the rock artists' interest in the eland cannot be connected easily with their dietary requirements. In Pager's (1971:335) survey of 3909 paintings in the Ndedema River gorge, only 29 are of hunts. If San rock pictures are imbued with power, it is not the power directly to improve the hunter's luck in the chase or the community's success in the management of its simplest material needs. We might recall Evans-Pritchard's (1956:80) well-known remarks about Nuer totemism, which L~vi-Strauss used to refute the simple 'empirical' and 'naturalistic' accounts of the selection of totemic

names preferred by Malinowski (L~vi-Strauss 1962:78): 'the animals and birds and fish and plants and artifacts which are of most use to the Nuer are absent from their list of totems. The facts of Nuer totemism do not, theretbre, support the contention of those who see in totemism chiefly, or even merely, a ritualization of empirical interests.' Nonetheless, as simple material concerns may be shaping of artistic and other languages, we will see that ultimately an image, through the complex mediation of symbols and chains of reference, does represent those

realities a society knows it must bring under control. In the control and manipulation of the world through representation and reference, it

seems to me that rock art in Africa is most properly associated with three major functional complexes, which we may reconstruct archaeologically, ethnographically, and art histori- cally. Although they are not easily distinguished, and each known culture apparently attends to aspects of all three contexts, rock art refers (1) to an extended network of ritual acts and beliefs, (2) to out-of-the-ordinary perception and knowledge, and (3) to adaptively significant local information, and was so intended to be perceived and understood by its original

makers and users. Scattered observations made throughout Africa have suggested that a rock picture, the

actual artifact which survives to us, may not in fact be the complete artifact; the picture was designed to be used in a particular kind of ritual, as one of the media or implements of ritual. I t has been claimed that rock paintings in Tanganyika were used in ceremonies for the deceased, whose person, property, and ornaments were painted on the rocks during the burial rites. This report has not been confirmed and is not, in any case, offered first-hand


(Culwick 1931). Among the pastoral Nilotes of East Africa, it is more or less well-established that painted rock shelters were used in meat-feasting rituals; the designs on the shelter walls have been identified as cattle brands (Gramly 1975).

More probable and comprehensive associations have been established between the subject matter of rock art and the episodes of significant local rituals. In some cases, this interpretation is hypothetical, for we have no evidence for the existence of these rituals other than the images themselves. Although ritual events are often thought to constitute a major thematic interest of Saharan rock painting, we have no external means of corroboration (see in detail Lhote 1966, 1967). Marcel Griaule (1934) has been able to effect some tentative connections between Saharan and Sudanese rock pictures in former French territories and ritual practices as documented anthropologically, and in Zaire we have been aided by the inclusion of Christian as well as indigenous themata in the painted caves (Vanden Bossche 1959; Mortelmans and Monteyne 1962). Too little, however, is known of the material and ideological culture of the prehistoric Sahara to generalize from these limited findings. Fabrizio Mori (1964) has proposed that the so-called 'Round-head style' in Saharan rock- painting refers to an elaborate, quasi-'religious' set of beliefs, especially centered upon a single, semi-anthropomorphic being.

In the Nile valley, one theme of rock art, 'dancing' or 'mourning' women associated with boats of bound papyrus, is paralleled on predynastic (Nagada II-III) painted pottery, and may represent the ceremony of mourning and transportation of the deceased from the east to the west bank of the Nile (Murray 1956). Later in the Pyramid Texts, a dynastic collection of magical and liturgical spells which preserve many vestiges of prehistoric ritual and belief, it is the body of the king which is ferried across the Nile to the blessed hereafter, accompanied by the mourning goddesses Isis and Nephthys, the sisters of the mythological first god-king of Egypt, Osiris. The king hunting the desert lion, the king smiting his enemies, and the opening of irrigation canals or appropriation of territories for sacred buildings are all activities sanctified in Egyptian royal ritual and official image-making, and themes with which early painted pottery, relief-sculpture, and rock drawings from prehistoric and early dynastic Egypt are occasionally concerned, although, at this early date, some references and details are quite obscure.

The most important evidence for a connection between prehistoric art and ritual most certainly comes from southern African cultures. The details of this research, inaugurated and developed byJ. D. Lewis-Williams, have been lucidly presented elsewhere (Lewis-Williams 1974, 1980, 1981a, 1981b, 1982, 1983), and space here is better used for general remarks. Dissatisfied with existing interpretations of southern rock-paintings, Lewis-Williams has undertaken a three-pronged investigation to evolve an appropriate account. Careful, quantitative and comparative study has focussed on the 'syntax' of rock-painting at particular sites ( 1972, 1974); Bushman folklore and culture, preserved in nineteenth-century ethnography, has been scrutinized for first-hand information about the significance of various iconographies (1980), and contemporary ritual practices of the related !Kung and /Xam San have been compared with the themes of southern San rock art (e.g. Lewis- Williams and Biesele 1978). Many individual details and motifs have been decoded through this painstaking examination, although the problem of dating individual rock pictures remains troublesome. 7 Most importantly, Lewis-Williams has been able to demonstrate that one of the chief interests of the rock artists was the representation of the events and

24 Whitney Davis

experiences of the San medicine dance (Lee 1968; Marshall 1969). 'The trance dance itself, the capture of the rain animal, and the experiences, symbols, and metaphors of trance were prominent among the artists' subject matter. I believe further than the trancers and the artists were, for the most part, one and the same' (Lewis-Williams 1982:434, and 1980:476).

The eland was, as we have seen, one of the most common subjects of San painters, and Lewis- Williams argues that the creature was a 'central or key symbol' for and in several significant

San rites, girls' puberty rituals, boys' first-kill rituals, marriage rituals, and the visions or experiences of a union of man and the animal in trance performance (Lewis-Williams 1981 a

offers detailed, elaborate evidence and discussion). An individual rock picture might be anything from a relatively uncomplicated and direct depiction of the actual rituals themselves to a highly symbolic, metaphorical exploration of the transcendental events of the

trance dance, but once we know the vocabulary of this rich iconography, we can, if we have enough information, begin to make sense of a given, complex composition.

By this route Lewis-Williams has arrived at a reliable (and testable) interpretation of the

meaning of some aspects of San iconography. One wants to know" thrther, of course, why this iconography was evolved in the first place; here, we may take it for granted, I think, that the

'symbolic work' of dancers, artists, or story-tellers is socially adaptive and quite thnctionat in the usual sense of the term, 8 but we want to know specifically how this is so, why this kind of work is carried out in this medium, and what the significance of individual, formal

preferences and individual, thematic decisions might be. Lewis-Williams proposes both specific and general answers to these questions. I f I can use a formula he does not himself

employ, it seems, I think, that southern San rock art is an effort to arrive at apubIic statement of essentially private experiences. A rock picture represents, in visible form, the events which San culture understood to take place during the trance dance or in the related experience of the medicine men and hunters. Like any art, rock art finds a form for significant knowledge and experience; this is not, needless to say, easily accomplished, if experience is, as here,

private, complex, and unordinary, nor is this function a negligible one.

• . . the artists intended their viewers to appreciate the trance associations of the eland and especially the dying eland. These images, at least, were operating on a fully manifest level; everyone could consciously share in the understanding of their associations . . . . The depiction in the rock-shelters of such visions could have made for wider and more vivid sharing and so constituted a beneficial pooling of both experience and power. In addition to extending the apprehension of the medicine men's visions, the art may have played another role in the system of symbolic work . . , the public display of painted trance experiences and the consequent common understanding might have reduced the novices' terror of the beyond and so enabled them to become effective medicine men (Lewis-Williams 1982:435).

Although critics have argued that these operations are too simple and banal to account for the proliferation of rock-paintings throughout the southern San region, this would be, I think, to misunderstand the fundamental importance of the trance experience and of the eland as the culture's symbol of many truths of the natural and cultural universe. As Lewis- Williams (1982) has recently argued, these are themes which organize the routine hierarchies of power within a group and of exchange between groups in San society as well as ritual or religious observance. The general ideological import of a rock drawing, however, comprehends not only the representation of particular local rites but also of all orders of supra-

normal experience.


Research in the American Southwest has lately led to the suggestion that some designs in

Indian rock art are reproductions of supra-normal perceptual experiences induced by

hallucinogens used in ritual (Blackburn 1977; Meighan 1980:87-88). Although there is no

evidence that hallucinogens were used in San ritual, it is certainly possible that the biophysical stresses of trance performance, as well as the culture's strong expectations about the qualities of a trance experience, lead directly to the 'perception' of supra-normal

phenomena or to altered states of awareness. One must be extremely cautious in evaluating an hypothesis of this kind. Trancers, shamans, and priests in many simple and developed societies claim to 'see' special things, and ethnographic or historical records suggest that

these claims have been made from the earliest times (Lewis-Williams 1980:472). Empirical Anglo-American anthropology has preferred, often, to construe these claims in the weakest

possible terms. Nonetheless, although we may wish to interpret the special 'seeing' of priests

and artists as a kind of wisdom or insight into themes and problems of cultural consequence, a visionary or dream-life may be credited with full reality by those who experience it. Anthropologists tend to move rapidly, if artificially, from words and images as modes of perception to words and images as modes of cognition; we are comfortable with the notion

that a culture may analyze and catalogue the powers of the universe as animate and spiritual, but we are far less comfortable with the notion that individuals may, in a literal and

immediate sense, see these powers. The matter is indeed complex. We do not, of course, wish to suppose that phenomenological awareness is some primal state of mental life, with

intellectual representation in language and art some kind of superstructure. Individuals may seek to find words or images for special phenomena or special perception; this process of representation is as much a work of conscious deliberation and cultural debate as it is any

form ofphenomenological perception, and it may precede or even substitute for perception. Once words and images have been articulated which find some degree of cultural acceptance,

it is likely that people begin to 'see ' --bel ieve in, take to be real, independent of the subjec t - -what it is they have been able to represent. Without, then, deciding whether shamans and artists literally saw the most unusual or special, the fantastical, we may submit,

more tentatively, that whatever the source of their awareness the representation of special phenomena was of deep interest to them.

For of course, throughout Africa, rock drawings, even the most straightforwardly 'narrative ' , are concerned to arrive at a clear, legible, effective representation of those aspects

of life which are problems for ordinary perception. Many drawings represent aspects of life which are unusual and rare, dramatic, threatening, poorly or partly understood, reserved for private or initiated knowledge, 'numinous' , inaccessible in or for day-to-day living, sacralized or myth ic - - in a word, striking for whatever particular reason we might be able to reconstruct. I have mentioned the representation of ritual experiences, but this theme encompasses numerous other individual expressions as well. At times it is perfectly obvious that some object or experience is foreign to a culture--chariots in the Sahara, Libyans or southerners in the confines of Egypt, Bantu or white men in the ve ld- -and are interesting to the culture for that very reason. At other times the novelty and refractoriness of an experience is much more difficult to detect, and archaeology arrives at this conclusion only by meticulously comparing the themes of rock art with a picture of a society's daily and material life built up from other sources. In the Nile valley, for example, most ordinary villagers could have known very little of the royal personage or of the vast extent of the desert beyond their

26 Whitney Davis

settlements, but rock-drawings contain many references to these foreign, special, and influential facts of life. As I have continually stressed, the relation between the world and the world as it appears in art is non-transitive; representation may map the world, but it also maps the particular, local interests of individual makers and users.

Furthermore, although an object or event may in fact be ordinarily available for ordinary understanding, it is usually perceived quite impressionistically and inattentively. Images focus and clarify knowledge of this kind, knowledge at the ordinary thresholds of perceptual awareness, attention, and education, and in so doing introduce the viewer to the novel or special aspects of his own uninstructed thinking. An artist may concentrate on particular telling details, the actual, but obscure, moment of the kill in a hunt, the actual movement of a swift-running animal, the actual disposition of parents and young in a massed herd, the actual construction of a hut, weapon, animal-trap, boat, or costume, and so on and on. Rock- pictures investigate another kind of special object or experience, namely, those of which it is necessary, in a practical sense, to have a precise understanding. We are introduced here to the third major functional context of rock art. In addition to the representation of ritually important experiences and out-of-the-ordinary phenomena, rock art encodes quantities of

local information. In the Nile valley, extensive neolithic ('A-Group' and 'C-Group') deposits near rock

drawings suggest that a variety of seasonal hunting and gathering activities were carried out in the vicinity of the cliffs and rocks at the river's edge and out into the deep wadis of the desert plateau itself (Wendorfet al. 1976). It is not yet clear whether individual rock drawings in these areas mark or locate important individual sites of activity--locations of mineral deposits, probabilities of plant and animal life--but an elementary exercise in comparing a comprehensive map of rock art sites with geomorphological and palaeoenvironmental maps does, at least, demonstrate that rock drawings were not positioned randomly. It has often been thought that the prehistoric artist was principally concerned with the location of a suitable surface, but comprehensive surveying has exploded this assumption, for 'suitable' surfaces may not be used, and drawings may appear in distinctly wrenching or irregular positions. Drawings are found on natural routes, of course, and also in somewhat inaccessible places; we need to imagine an original situation in which these routes and places were first being investigated, exploited, and 'mapped'. In South Africa, Karl Butzer and his associates have discovered striking correlations between the distribution of particular drawings and engravings in areas of the veld and palaeovegetal or palaeofaunal distributions. 'This logical pattern of spatial variation argues that, despite the hunting preferences and cultural perceptions of the engravers, their artistic selection from the regional macrofauna was reasonably representative of the underlying ecozonation' (Butzer et al. 1979:1206). As we have seen, not all rock art is necessarily attentive to the real features of the natural or phenomenological world, and these correlations are sufficiently precise that we must, I think, take them as evidence of an original intent to chart the immediate environment.

We still need to know, of course, exactly how an individual drawing was supposed to signify in this general context. It has often been supposed that rock pictures mark a site as being sacred or otherwise special (see generally Meighan 1980:88-89). We know from a few associated deposits, throughout Africa, that some sites were used for shelter or bivouac as well as for artistic activity (Vinnicombe 1972b: 128-29, for references), and that a distinction between living and 'sacred' sites often drawn in the literature is probably too artificial


(discussion in Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967:172). A high density of ritual or symbolic images at a site may imply that the site was visited for ritual purposes, by artists and initiates who may have wished to record important experiences and instruct others in them. Pictures of local flora and fauna, of hunts and kills, of faunal movements, and so forth, may have been intended to preserve information about a region for the use of its inhabitants, whether it would, finally, be a practical, pedagogical, or ceremonial use.

The exploration and exploitation of a territory does not, however, consist wholly in simple signposting of this type. The mapping of a real, geographical territory is only one aspect, although no doubt a fundamental aspect, of the mapping of a social territory, the construction of a social and ideological identity (see generally Godelier 1978a, 1978b). In a few cases, as we have seen, rock pictures operate directly as the heraldic territorial emblems of distinct social groups. L6vi-Strauss' brilliant and controversial analysis of Northwest Coast Indian

societies has suggested that social identity may be proclaimed through a work of art in more indirect but nonetheless highly readable ways. One must know the masking traditions of several contiguous, separate social groups to see that a given, individual mask from one group is a formal or iconographic quotation from, inversion of, or other structural variation upon the artistic practice of a neighboring group (L6vi-Strauss 1982). Art historians have always been attuned to the way in which a culture seeks out forms which distinguish themselves, sometimes indeed in a relatively direct transformational relation, from the forms of ancestors, competitors, neighbors, or the global culture (e.g. Kubler 1962; Grabar 1973). We know too little about the 'style areas' of African rock art and about the composition of prehistoric social groups, but further archaeological study will, I believe, take us in the direction of such conclusions.

Prehistoric hunting and gathering groups, we remember, ranged widely over extensive territories according to various seasonal and ritual rhythms. 9 'The fragmentary observa- tional and linguistic record of the South African Bushmen', for example, 'suggests great mobility and a highly flexible adaptational system, despite marked territoriality, linguistic diversity, and environmental contrasts' (Butzer et al. 1979:1210). Recent research suggests that a group's territory was not defined in any simple but in an extremely elaborate way, and might overlap with the territories of other groups. Access to water or mineral sources, for instance, might be shared, while access to game or concentrations of vegetation might be strictly protected. Moreover, the demographic composition of a group was certainly more fluid than a straightforward, but abstract, catalogue of the principal kinship relations might suggest. Men from different groups might band together for both ritual and routine projects, requiring a special degree of cooperation and the exchange of information or technology. Meillassoux (1972, 1978) and others have argued, too, that the nature of an individual's knowledge and exchange with other individuals would vary with his social or generational rank. Senior, fully initiated members of a group might exchange goods, information, or wives over a wide area, in a complex network of reciprocities, whereas junior, dependent members of a group might exchange services and goods only with seniors or immediate peers. The fullest powers of physical coercion, of course, were commanded by the younger, fitter juniors, but seniors could easily compensate for their physical disadvantage by controlling 'scientific' and ritual knowledge, through hierarchies of instruction and initiation, and by controlling the supply of valuable commodities, including marriageable women. It would be extremely enlightening, from this point of view, to investigate the particular status of artists and

28 Whitney Davis

shamans in the production and control of information and in the dissemination and manipulation of significant symbols and 'symbolic goods'. The exchange of information and preservation of values was a matter both of relations between separate groups and of relations within a single, scattered, expanding and contracting, but ultimately stable social unit. Lewis-Williams, Butzer, and others have properly stressed that rock pictures served a purpose at both levels: a rock picture preserved information and emphasized certain cultural values for both the stable and the transient populations of an area, and 'may have defined the operational area of an identity-conscious population during a specific period' (Butzer et al. 1979:1210).

In brief, we may conclude that rock art represents features of the environment which are aesthetically charged, for practical or symbolic reasons, but which are also problematic, in some specific sense, for ordinary, untutored perception. To draw out the further implication, rock pictures function as a medium of social expression and communication about the nature of cultural experience--in other words, as a particular and perhaps rather specialized instrument of the production process and of the reproduction of the social formation, like any technology or social practice an archaeologist or anthropologist might routinely investigate. We have seen, too, that the special nature and constraints of representation--of signification or symbol--necessarily mean that the kind of social work a rock-picture can perform requires special attention, for, like any technology or social practice, art does not do every kind of social work but only a particular, limited kind.

The rock arts of Africa, these acts of representation and communication, are not directed randomly into a linguistic void or cultural vacuum. Leaving aside idle or idiosyncratic efforts, fully typical rock art would engage directly with the primal, principal experiences, interests, and contradictions of the world and one's own society, of the world's 'otherness' - - i n representing, as we have seen, adaptively significant or ritually compelling phenomena, ordinarily or perceptually obscure, in undertaking territorial and cultural self-identification and self-definition, or in serving the instruction and control of young, competing, or foreign elements within social life. The act of representation was the integration of these experiences into the social body, the social process, and also, most importantly, the act of extracting from

the social process a set of informative, resonant symbols and narratives. As I have continually stressed, the 'mapping' which obtains between art and the 'reality' of its world, of its references, is not a simple or complete one. The work or operation of art is not just the illustration or reflection or expression of social themes or strategies of social life but in a strong sense is also one medium of thought, at least, in which social life and strategy is actually constructed, for purposes which might be quite specific, ideological or rhetorical, or even private. Representation, in other words, is the material site of one's thought about one's knowledge of the world. The knowledge of what is central to production and reproduction or the experience of what is novel, feared, or unknown must be wrested into the forms and symbols of a fully resolved, decisive, legible, public language, the language of ritual, myth, or art. What is represented can be known and shared, becomes the object of instruction, admiration, devotion, or consensus, might be the point of reference for appropriate cultural concern or social action. The archaeology of prehistoric material culture, our knowledge of material ways of life, is only part of what we need to know as archaeologists. The other part, of course, is the archaeology of prehistoric thought, this network of representations, linguistic, ritual, and artistic, by which the phenomena of the world, potentially unruly or intransigent,


were introduced to human knowledge--for human knowledge, as objects, in the end, of human material and social manipulation.

Endnotes

I do not attempt a systematic review of the literature on prehistoric rock art in Africa; my remarks are based on many different studies, impossible to cite individually. Gaskin's bibliography (1965) is fairly comprehensive for most regions of Africa to the date of its publication; it should be supplemented by Davis 1979 for the Nile valley and Vinnicombe 1976:369-78 for southern Africa. Few general studies exist on rock art, or on prehistoric art in general. Levine 1957, Giedion 1960, Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967, in English, and Laming-Empfiraire 1962, Leroi-Gourhan t 967, 1982, in French, are fundamental studies of palaeolithic art, from which I have drawn some suggestions. Meighan 1980 reviews rock art research in North America, comprehensively indexed in Wellman's magnificent bibliography (t978, 1979). The New World traditions are significant points of comparison. Smith t 968 is a sane overview of north African rock art. Lewis-Williams (1982, 1983) and Biesele (1978, 1983) have presented major studies of southern African material; they attend to theoretical problems, archaeological, art historical, 'functionalist', 'structuralist', neo-Marxist, semiotogical, and so on. Frequently I assume that they have said what it is possible to say at the moment on a variety of issues. Although I would diverge on some matters, occasionally raised here, on the whole I have passed over any debate of this complexity in favor of a more straightforward discussion (although see note 4). The Sahara is, from the point of view of this paper, much less well documented and studied; Lhote 1952 and Huard 1953 index the principal sites, and von Gagern and Kuper's Sahara (1978) contains individual studies which represent the state of research. I cannot undertake a detailed examination of the archaeological situation of the three traditions I survey. For the Nile valley, see particularly Wendorfet al. 1976, Wendorfand Schild 1982 and Hoffrnan 1979; important studies of rock art include Winkler 1938-39, Butzer 1958, Huard 1965, Resch 1967, Hellstr6m 1970, Cervi~ek 1974 (see Davis 1979). For the Sahara, see Camps-Fabrer 1966, Camps 1974, von Gagern and Kuper 1978; important studies of rock art include Lhote 1963, 1976, Monod 1963, Ripolt-Perello (ed.) 1964, Smith 1968, Huard and Allard 1970, Huard and Leclant 1972. For southern Africa, see Sampson 1974, Phillipson t977; important studies of rock art include Rudner and Rudner 1970, Pager 1971, 1975, Vinnicombe 1976, Lewis-Williams 1981a, 1983 (ed.) I am grateful to Nicholas David (University of Calgary), Karl W. Butzer (University of Chicago),J. D. Lewis-Williams (University ofWitwatersrand),Janette Deacon (Univer- sity of Stellenbosch), and Francesco Pellizzi (New York), for references, information, advance copies of unpublished studies, and comments on the argument of this paper. Associated with the work of the Abb~ Breuil, and commonly proposed in general texts, this theory is likely to embed the four assumptions I initially considered (see Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967). Although the art in the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia may be as old as 27,000 or 19,000 years (Wendt 1976), other early dates are considerably younger--ca 8500 bp for the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa (Thackeray el al. 1981) and the 'naturalistic' style of the Sahara, related to the 'dotted wavy line' pottery (Barich 1980), and, more tentatively,

30 Whitney Davis

the eighth to sixth millennia bc for the geometric engravings at Oliver Myers' Site X X X I I at Abka, Wadi Halfa (1958), in Sudanese Nubia, and possibly related figurative rock drawings of the Upper Egyptian late pleistocene cultures (Davis n.d.). I thank Professor K. W. Butzer for advice on these problems. We cannot, then, take it for granted that meanings have been identified or exhausted when we happen to locate what a representation is of. Art does not stand in a transitive or fully homologous relation to its referents. 'Natural species are chosen' as totemic designations, L~vi-Strauss (1962:89) writes, 'not because they are "good to eat" but because they are

"good to think".' We should understand this tkmous formulation, I think, as a better statement of the fundamental problem of totemic designation, and by implication, of all forms of representation--for which we do not have an adequate theory. Why, in other words, are certain thoughts thought? We might indeed be led astray by recent, programmatic 'structuralist' or 'mega-functionalist' accounts, as much as by older, baldly aesthetic or utilitarian explanations. In some structuralist accounts, the world of things and social relations seems to enter the language and rhetoric of representation ---the words and images of the culture--as somehow already solved by human thought, already classified or fixed in metaphorical, structural associations. From this odd point of view, representation itself can only be regarded as the final, visible, social product of thought about the world of things and social relations. Clearly, however, analysis of this kind cannot take us very far, for, like the older accounts it is supposed to replace, it

continues to idealize thought, and thought continues to remain inaccessible to material analysis. Thought has already occurred before the image is produced. The source and site of the resolutions of thought continue to remain mysterious--and seem to be the 'natural ' properties of an 'innate' logic or some vague cultural 'propensity', 'preference', or 'state of mind ' - -when representation is taken to be merely the 'expression' or 'embodiment' of thinking which goes on elsewhere. As I have briefly argued elsewhere (Davis 1982), notions that art reflects something in the mind of the individual or in the world must be rewritten in a more scientific (tess idealist?) account of cognition. A more appropriate theory, but barely worked out in its material terms, takes representation itself to be the site of thought, and recognizes, too, that not all mental experience is representational; representation is one and a rather special kind of mental experience. Theories of the 'homology of structure between human thought in action and the human object to which it is applied' (Lfivi-Strauss 1962:91 ) tend to invoke the grid-matrice as the model of the relation between human thought and the world. A study of representation, however, forces us to recoil from any theory in which thought and the world necessarily meet each other halfway and accommodate, integrate. This is not to say that a work of art is without social function or logic, but only that representation maps the world partially and sometimes ineffectively, not so much one point of many structurally associated points on the matrice but, to use the metaphor Gombrich (t960) adopts from Popper (1979), a single searchlight probing the darkness. (This qualification will permit us to see that the nature of the relation between representation and the world is contingent. Should the 'structures' of the world and of pictures be strikingly homologous--as, just possibly, in some primitive and ancient ar ts--a certain special historical or anthropological explanation is called for.) Why, indeed, do we have a history of thoughts? Perhaps, as L6vi-Strauss (1962:91) grandly (and fondly) hopes, if meaning 'is not everywhere it is nowhere', but


this formula polarizes the distinct shading of possibilities which remain crucial for the student of representation. Some structural or semiotic theories might regard what is not represented in word or image as imponderable; we do not, however, need to be tied to this odd version of the order of things, overly impressed by the supposed power of one sort of 'language' (and we operate many) to provide the world for the subject. Much that might be knowable is not known, and much that is known is not represented, and art cannot be understood unless, in the words of Wittgenstein, we 'think the limits' of a kind of thought, and see it as bounded and incomplete, one way, in Goodman's term (1975), of 'wortdmaking'.

5 Among psychoanalysts, Roheim (1950) takes up the problem of totemic designation; Devereux (1950) includes important analytic assessments of the graphic projections of a mentally disturbed Plains Indian. TheJungians have a good deal to say, almost all of it unhelpful. Lewis-Williams' (1982) paper is the first specific study of rock art I know of

which directly invokes materialist vocabularies. It has to be said, of course, that many archaeologists, for many generations, have, perhaps unwittingly or unwillingly, con- tributed to the present-day synthesis of sociological and biological understandings of human behavior.

6 I should stress that I mean this terminology in its everyday, straightforward sense; I proclaim no alliance with semiotics. I take it for granted that representation is social, functional, and adaptive; a specialized kind of social work like art-making, however, requires a detailed scrutiny qualified by an understanding of the syntactical and semantic density of artistic languages, the ambiguities of representation, and the highly ideological character of many projects.

7 As Lewis-Williams (1982:447) recognizes, we cannot be certain that the southern San of the nineteenth century maintained all customs and artistic practices of southern San (Wilton/Smithfield) culture, which has a long history (see notes 1 and 3 above); recently, Butzer et al. (1979) and Manhire et al. (1983) have been able to specify important temporal changes in the sequence of southern rock pictures.

8 See Biesele 1978, 1983, and for remarkable and powerful statements of the general theory, Godelier 1978a, 1978b.

9 See generally Fagan and Van Noten 1971, Yellen and Harpending 1972; for the Nile valley, Wendorf and Schild 1982; for southern Africa, Lee 1979, Silberbauer 1981, Manhire et al. 1983, with further references.

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Documents

Representation and knowledge in the prehistoric rock art of Africa