Rock Art and Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes: Iconography, Cosmology and Topography in Southern Africa

Landscape studies of hunter-gatherer rock art often suffer from logical flaws. Some of these failings stem from the founding question that researchers ask: "Why do some places have images while others do not?" This question is misleading and not particularly helpful in some-but not all-contexts where there is no direct ethnographic evidence to provide an answer. Instead, we suggest that a better question from which to begin is: "How are rock art images related to landscape?". To answer this question, we examine the relationship between iconography, cosmology and topography in two areas of southern African San rock painting. We argue that cosmology guided iconography and that the imagery, in turn, manipulated topography into landscape for the San. In this view, we do not need to rely on cognitive templates that invest topography a priori with significance that then determines the choice of locale for art. Instead, landscape for the San was socially and symbolically constructed through the placement of imagery.