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Rock Art at Bamboo Mountain – Part 2

In April Drs Ghilraen Laue and Justine Wintjes of the Department of Human Sciences, KZN Museum, and Dr Vibeke Viestad of the University of Oslo, Norway, visited seven rock art sites on Bamboo Mountain in the Underberg area. Our purpose was to photograph in full the site of the 1910 removal (see Part 1 ) as well as to look at changes in the condition of the paintings across all of the sites.

BMM2 GL2 Justine and Vibeke looking out over the landscape from Bamboo Mountain.

In 1961, Patricia Vinnicombe, renowned rock art copyist and scholar, visited the sites on Bamboo Mountain. Many of Vinnicombe’s photographs and copies are housed in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. Armed with digital copies of her photographs and a physical copy of her 1976 book People of the Eland, we set off to visit the sites and note any changes in the paintings.

Some of the panels include images of horses which means they were in all likelihood made after 1835. The Bamboo Mountain sites were first recorded by Trooper Whyte in 1910, and at the time of Vinnicombe’s recording, at least some of the imagery would have been between 60 and 125 years old – so possibly almost two centuries old now.

The red paint appears relatively stable, and the most startling changes involve black. For a long time we searched for the cattle pictured in the photograph below. Our difficulty in locating the images was not due to poor observation, but due to us looking for the wrong colour. In the intervening years the images have changed from black to white!

BMM2 PJV Photograph taken by Vinnicombe c1961 (Photo: http://www.sarada.co.za/#/library/BMM2/images/RARI-PJV-RSA-BMM2-6)

BMM2 GL1 Photograph taken by G. Laue in April 2023 of the same cattle.

The same phenomenon is visible across several sites. Below is a colour rendering made by Vinnicombe in 1961 compared with a photograph of the same panel today. The white figures have almost entirely disappeared and the black figures are now entirely white. Further research is required to establish the reasons for this dramatic change in colour.

PJV 01 189 Colour rendering by Vinnicombe made July 1961 at Bamboo Mountain site 4 (KZN Museum Collection)

BMM4 GL Photograph of the same panel by G. Laue taken in April 2023.

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Rock Art at Bamboo Mountain – Part 1

In April Drs Justine Wintjes and Ghilraen Laue of the Department of Human Sciences, KZN Museum, along with Dr Vibeke Viestad from the University of Oslo, Norway, visited seven rock art sites in the Underberg area. One of the things we wanted to see was a site on Bamboo Mountain from which rock art was removed over a century ago.

BMM1 GL2 View out of the shelter Bamboo Mountain site 1, Dr Viestad on the left (Photo: G. Laue)

In the early 1900s, there was widespread concern that the rock paintings of the Drakensberg were fast disappearing due to vandalism and natural weathering. Trooper A.D. Whyte was appointed to locate all the Bushman paintings in the Underberg district. He set out with two constables, a pack horse, a small patrol tent, provisions and a rifle, and began to search the mountains from north to south over four arduous months. He located thirty-seven sites comprising a total of 1041 figures. His 1910 report led to the removal of about twenty painted compositions by stone mason R. Clingan. The stones were deposited at the then Natal Museum. The large panel removed from Bamboo Mountain, which came out in multiple pieces, is still on display in the Museum today.

BBM1 PJV Photograph of the panel in situ before the panel was removed in 1910. The full length of the scene is approximately 244cm (Photo: Vinnicombe, P. 1976. People of the Eland. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, page 45).

BMM1 GL1 Panel removed from Bamboo Mountain site 1 on display at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. During removal the panel broke in 9 pieces. (Photo: G. Laue)

Today huge scars can be seen where the large panel was taken out, but there are still several other painted panels in the shelter which, despite worries at the time, have remained largely unchanged over the last hundred years. Elsewhere, however, the rock paintings have all but disappeared.

BMM1 GL3 Examples of the paintings that can still be seen in the Bamboo Mountain shelter. (Photo: G. Laue)

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KwaZulu-Natal Museum at Tourism Indaba

Come and visit the South African Museums Association (SAMA) stand at the Tourism Indaba at the Durban International Convention Centre between 9 and 11 May. The stand is the result of a collaboration between 16 museums across the country; this large-scale collaboration has been organized amongst SAMA affiliates for the Tourism Indaba.

The KwaZulu-Natal branch of SAMA has been instrumental in driving this initiative and our very own Dimakatso Tlhoaele in the Department of Human Sciences has been part of this team. You can meet Dimakatso and members of other participating institutions at the stand over the next three days. A booklet with background on the participating institutions is also available in print (only a limited quantity are available) from the stand but also digitally for download.

Cover of SAMA booklet 1

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Mark your schedules and save the date! The KZN Museum's next storeroom talk will take place on Wednesday, 10th of May at 10h30. Gunther Moller will be presenting on the Jojosi Donga 1, an open-air knapping site of the Middle Stone Age.

In 1991, archaeologists Aron Mazel and Mike Moon, with geologist Greg Botha, excavated at Jojosi near Nquthu in KwaZulu-Natal. Jojosi is marked by severe donga erosion, which has revealed in-situ knapping horizons with abundant stone artifacts. These seemed to represent episodes of flaked stone artifact production. Aron did not pursue the project and the material has remained stored in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum archive since the excavation. Gunther will show actual artefacts from Mazel’s excavation, showing how exceptional the preservation is at Jojosi, and discuss insights we can gain from them into the technology and raw-material use of hunter-gatherer groups in the region in the distant past. His work and new fieldwork at Jojosi opens doors to extending Middle Stone Age research in KwaZulu-Natal from rock shelters to open-air sites.

Don't miss out on this exciting talk! Send RSVP to Dr Ghilraen Laue at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

#kzmuseum #HumanSciences #storeroomtalk #stoneage #JojosiDonga1 #archaeology #RockShelter #kwazulunatal #geology #museums #museumlife #pietermaritzburg #maritzburg

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