Rock Painting S00176, Bethlehem, Dihlabeng District Municipality, Free State, South Africa.
Woodhouse, Herbert Charles, 1919- Photographer.
still image
[place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified],
[8000 B.C. to 1900 B.C.]
zxx
This San rock painting depicts an upside-down, plum-red antelope with a bleeding nose and, at the upper left, a smaller antelope painted in yellow, also bleeding from the nose. The upside-down posture and the nasal emanations both indicate death. For the San, this death was both literal and metaphoric. Metaphorically, death involved a shaman's passage to the Spirit World that was believed to exist behind the rock surface. The painting is from the eastern Free State of South Africa, which is noted for its depictions of upside-down antelope in a variety of unusual contexts. The image of the painting is part of the Woodhouse Rock Art Collection of the Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria. The collection includes more than 23,000 slides, maps, and tracings from a large number of rock art sites in South Africa. The San are hunter-gatherer people who lived throughout southern and eastern Africa for thousands of years before being displaced by African tribes and European settlers. The San people continue to live in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.
Title devised, in English, by Library staff.
Original resource extent: Representation of a slide.
University of Pretoria Library.
Description based on data extracted from World Digital Library, which may be extracted from partner institutions.
8000 B.C. to 1900 B.C.
Dihlabeng District Municipality Indigenous peoples Rain animals Rock art Rock paintings San (African people) San art
South Africa Bethlehem
Woodhouse Rock Art Collection
https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.3006