Prehistory · Undated · La Rochelle rock shelter, near Carolina, Mpumalanga, South Africa, Africa
Two tiny stick figures are the first stencilled rock art found in southern Africa
The authors think red paint was blown or splashed over a template to make the 9-centimetre figures in a Mpumalanga shelter, but their age and makers are unknown.
La Rochelle rock shelter, near Carolina, Mpumalanga, South Africa, Africa Archaeologists have reported the first stencilled rock art known from southern Africa. The find is two small stick-like figures in a rock shelter called La Rochelle, near the town of Carolina in Mpumalanga province, South Africa. Nobody yet knows how old they are, or who made them.
David Pearce of the University of the Witwatersrand and Kiah Johnson of the University of Cambridge describe the figures. Their study appears in the South African Archaeological Bulletin.
A method new to the region
Painters in this region mostly used brushes or fingers. In stencilling, paint goes around an object and leaves a bare shape on the rock. The method had never been recorded in southern Africa before.
It is well known elsewhere. Hand stencils appear in Ice Age caves in Europe and in China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. In Egypt, tiny hand stencils once taken for infant hands were later matched to lizard forelimbs. At one site in northern Australia, artists made scaled-down stencils, likely from beeswax templates.
A large shelter recorded twice before
La Rochelle is big for the area, about 30 metres long and 5 metres deep. Most shelters in the Highlands are shallow, and their paintings are faded and scarce. Here the walls carry fine-line brush paintings of eland, hartebeest, small antelope and human-like figures.
Anna Steyn recorded the site in 1995, and Mduduzi Maseko recorded it again in 2020. Neither noted the stencils. The marks are faint, which likely explains why they were missed. The team sharpened their photographs with D-stretch software.
Paint blown or splashed over a template
The figures are about 9 centimetres tall. They look like crude stick drawings, with vague heads and unjointed limbs hanging off a line-like torso. Each shows as bare rock inside red paint.
The paint is thickest between the two figures and thins out farther away. A halo of tiny specks surrounds the denser areas. There is no hard outline of the kind brush or finger painting leaves. Pearce and Johnson read this as liquid paint blown or splashed over a template in one event.
Nobody knows what the template was
The shapes match nothing natural, so the template must have been a made object. Beeswax is one idea. San groups collected honey, and bees carry symbolic weight in San belief.
However, there is no evidence that people here made wax objects. Clay, carved wood or bone, basketry and cut leather fit equally well.
No date and no known makers
The stencils do not overlap any other painting. So there is no way to say whether they came before, after or alongside the rest. Direct dating elsewhere in southern Africa shows that paintings pile up in one shelter over hundreds of years, sometimes more than a thousand.
Size gives no clue either. All paintings in the region are well under life size, so figures of 9 centimetres fit right in.
The shelter has changed a lot. Photographs show a concreted floor, pews and an improvised pulpit, and recent scratched graffiti near the figures. The authors do not know whether hunter-gatherers made the stencils. If they did, making the template could have been a ritual act, as making paint was in San tradition.
Pearce and Johnson hope others will search Mpumalanga and nearby regions for more examples. A larger set would let researchers test these ideas.
Sources (1)
- First stencilled rock art in southern Africa found in a Mpumalanga shelter (Archaeology News)
Paper: Pearce, D. and Johnson, K., South African Archaeological Bulletin
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