Touching the Colors of the Past: Ochre Painting Workshops at the Origins Centre Museum, South Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ochre is a colorful thread that meanders through our human story. This iron-rich pigmentous rock became habitually used by Homo sapiens during the Late Pleistocene in Africa. It was later used in the creation of rock art paints, and is still used around the world in various ways. Ochre painting workshops are offered at Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of the larger museum experience and outreach program. The interactions offer an immersive, archaeologically inspired activity to bring the past to life and to make the museum content more meaningful; to touch the past and be a part of it. The workshops are created using archaeologically informed content and tools to teach about the past uses of ochre while allowing the attendee to explore the subject from different ways of producing ochre powder, different tools for mixing and painting, to the range of ingredients used as binders and aggregates. The workshops allow the colors of the past to come to life. However, they also create a platform for meaningful, culturally-specific accounts of current ochre applications (from ingestion to sunscreen) that could inform our understanding of past archaeological ochre use practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41507.0