An Eye for the Cycle of Life: Exploring Rock Art in the Khomas Region

Abstract

Rock art sites in the Khomas Region can best be understood if located within a landscape- based approach as Kinahan (2020) compellingly argues. Such an approach has the advantage of connecting primary resource sites with evidence of scattered occupation of secondary resource sites, mediated by social relations that determine access to these resources. Many rock art sites are in mountainous terrain, for the Region is named after the Nama ǀomas (mountain) (Grünert, 2000:30) which, with an average height of almost 2,000m, acted as natural retreats for hunter-gatherers competing with herders and farmers for resources. Most rock art sites are located in relative proximity to water. Even so, some sites are far from river courses and water – several kilometres in fact. Despite an overall similarity of paintings across the region, no two sites have quite the same set of images. For this reason, it is important to explore the relationships between the art, social life, landscape and its resources, hence the title of this article. The legibility1 of the paintings is a matter of disagreement among researchers. For some analysts, much of the imagery is literal: humans and animals have recognizable represented morphologies: bags, bows, breasts, buttocks, penises and young. Their assumption is that the image-maker wanted the viewer to recognize his or her subject matter. This is what the Zimbabwean archaeologist Peter Garlake (1995) calls ‘the principle of legibility’. This legibility may, however, not be enough in itself. A second level has to be to attempt an understanding of how the image-makers think. Rock art affords insights into hunter- gatherer spiritual life. While not every archaeologist agrees, there is a sizeable body of historical ethnography that argues that some of the art is shamanic (Dawson, 1988; Lewis-Williams, 1981, 2002, 2019). Kinahan (2020:14), however, usefully warns against the ‘ahistorical reliance on the authority of ethnographic sources’. A further problem is that ethnography tends to present hunter-gatherers in a rather essentialist way as if they are static and unchanging.