The nineteenth-century recording of Drakensberg rock art

Record summary

European settlers, missionaries, and colonial officials recorded and collected descriptions of San rock paintings in the Drakensberg during the nineteenth century. These records form an early documentary layer for one of southern Africa’s major archaeological art traditions, but they frequently interpreted images through biblical, racial, or evolutionary assumptions. The lead matters for comparing image documentation, oral history, and later archaeological interpretation. Modern scholarship treats the paintings as historically layered and culturally specific rather than as anonymous “primitive” art.