South Africa is covered in stunning rock art. Most of this art was made by Khoisan communities and it includes engravings found on the boulders in the interior parts of the country and paintings found in the shelters on the mountains that fringe the interior plateau. The rock paintings in these shelters are incredibly sophisticated; they are small and have complex shading. They are also often superimposed in many layers,made over many years—sometimes centuries.These qualities make it very difficult to record the imagery. The standard practice over the last three decades has been to photograph the images and to make a direct tracing of the panels. Tracing is a laborious affair and requires significant training and experience for proficiency.

New digital techniques allow for images to be enhanced and for some invisible images to be made visible again. Developments in digital photogrammetry have also allowed for the accurate stitching of multiple two-dimensional photos into an accurate three-dimensional model of rock art shelter walls. In the Department of Human Sciences (DHS) at KZNM, two scholars are working on different projects related to digital photogrammetry and rock art. Dr Justine Wintjes is looking at how to reconstruct rock art panels that were destroyed through the removal of sections—some of which are now housed in the KZNM—by digitally integrating removed sections with the material that remains at the site. Angela Ferreira, a volunteer at the museum, is working on how to produce digital tracings from three-dimensional renderings of rock shelters. Both these projects hold the potential to revolutionise the recording of South African rock paintings.

It is the job of every museum to grow its collections. In 2019, the KZN Museum purchased an important collection of items collected among the BaTonga people of the Zambezi River Valley. The BaTonga, who number about 300,000 were forcibly resettled from their homes in the valley by the oppressive Rhodesian administration to enable the construction of the Kariba Dam in the 1950s. The Tonga language is widely spoken in Zimbabwe today as it is an important lingua franca. The items were collected in the Siabuwa area, south of Kariba in north-western Zimbabwe in the 1970s by Thomas Huffman, as ‘scientific mementos’ arising from his ethnoarchaeological study of the relationship between architectural structures, pots and population numbers. Items included in the purchased collections include drums, thumb pianos, clothing, headrests, hunting weapons, and stools. The collection was accessioned and then fumigated before being catalogued, photographed and stored in the collection rooms.

Revisiting the Goodall archive: rock art as a site of enchantment

Justine Wintjes and Laura de Harde

Elizabeth Goodall née Elisabeth Mannsfeld (1891–1971) worked as a curator of rock art in what was then Southern Rhodesia for more than four decades. Originally from Germany, she was a member of the Frobenius expedition to southern Africa in 1928–1930. She returned to southern Africa after the expedition and went on to work at the Queen Victoria Museum in Salisbury (today the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences, Harare). She produced a vast archive of rock art copies and recordings prior to the interpretative revolution that Patricia Vinnicombe and David Lewis-Williams pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though the meaning and purpose of the art remained largely enigmatic to her, Goodall was one of many artists trained in a western tradition who were inspired to make copies of rock art, despite having little to no understanding of its symbolic dimensions. Her copying practice illustrates the capacity of rock art to ‘enchant’ the viewer through its formal and material aspects.

Saturday, 19 October at 10h30, at the KZN Museum