Deciphering Ancient Minds The Mystery Of San Bushmen Rock Art

Download or read book Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushmen Rock Art written by David Lewis-Williams and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goes to the heart of contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern" minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic conclusions about the nature of ancient societies. How did ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.

Download or read book Rock Art Studies: News of the World V written by Paul Bahn and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the fifth volume in the series Rock Art Studies: News of the World. Like the previous editions, it covers rock art research and management across the globe over a five-year period, in this case the years 2010 to 2014 inclusive.

Download or read book A Painted Ridge: Rock art and performance in the Maclear District, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa written by David Mendel Witelson and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a suite of spatially close San (Bushmen) rock painting sites in the Maclear District of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. As a suite, the sites are remarkable because, despite their proximity to each other, they share patterns of similarity and simultaneous difference.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art written by Bruno David and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 1185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.

Download or read book Cognitive Archaeology written by David Whitley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive Archaeology: Mind, Ethnography, and the Past in South Africa and Beyond aims to interpret the social and cultural lives of the past, in part by using ethnography to build informed models of past cultural and social systems and partly by using natural models to understand symbolism and belief. How does an archaeologist interpret the past? Which theories are relevant, what kinds of data must be acquired, and how can interpretations be derived? One interpretive approach, developed in southern Africa in the 1980s, has been particularly successful even if still not widely known globally. With an expressed commitment to scientific method, it has resulted in deeper, well-tested understandings of belief, ritual, settlement patterns and social systems. This volume brings together a series of papers that demonstrate and illustrate this approach to archaeological interpretation, including contributions from North America, Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, in the process highlighting innovative methodological and substantive research that improves our understanding of the human past. Professional archaeological researchers would be the primary audience of this book. Because of its theoretical and methodological emphasis, it will also be relevant to method and theory courses and postgraduate students.

Download or read book Contemporary Dance and Southern African Rock Art written by Sylvia "Magogo" Glasser and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book weaves archaeology, anthropology, culture, politics, colonial history, dance and choreography into a life-transforming tapestry. It charts the extraordinary story of the author’s work in South Africa during the abhorrent system of Apartheid when she started a mixed-race dance company called Moving into Dance in the garage of her house. Her in-depth research into rock art, its meaning, the creation and performance of Tranceformations, the dancers’ own transformative experiences, as well as issues of cultural appropriation, are at the core of this book. It straddles different disciplines, and shows in real terms how art, or specifically dance, can transform people’s lives, not only in physical or cognitive parameters, but that it can change attitudes and perceptions of both participants and observers; that it can touch the human spirit and transcend the very essence of being human. This book also includes a link to a video of the 30-minute dance “Tranceformations”, choreographed by the author.

Download or read book Anthropomorphism, Anthropogenesis, Cognition written by Dragoş Gheorghiu and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropomorphism could be described as a production of analogies generated by human cognition. It is present in the imaginary, mythologies, religions, and material culture of all ages. This book approaches anthropomorphism from the moment of anthropogenesis, tracing its presence in nature and material culture in prehistory and Antiquity.