Best Foot Forward: The Social Significance of Cattle Forelegs in South African San Rock Art

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rock paintings of cattle raids are common in South Africa's southeastern mountains. Traditionally, such scenes are thought to illustrate some degree of conflict between two groups. The postures of the cattle depicted in the same scenes have been interpreted as showing movement such as walking or being driven from one place to another. Such art-historical interpretations overlook not only the robust tradition of ethnographically-informed rock art research in South Africa but also the embodied symbolism of cattle themselves. In African farmer and agropastoral societies, it is the chief who receives particular 'cuts' or pieces of a slaughtered or hunted animal. This raises two questions. First, why is the right foreleg in rock paintings of cattle sometimes shown extended in a manner unlikely to be a stylistic exaggeration of bovine movement? Second, why do African farmer beliefs appear to have been depicted in a distinctly hunter-gatherer rock art tradition? This contribution seeks to answer these questions by considering who the audience was for such performances of image-making. It challenges the conclusions of Western art-historical approaches by revisiting the rich painted details in cattle-raiding scenes and drawing on the ethnographies of southern African hunter-gatherers and agropastoralists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38040.0