Deciphering Ancient Minds The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art David Lweis Williams & Sam Challis

Deciphering Ancient Minds The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art 

Author: David Lweis Williams & Sam Challis 

Publisher: Thames & Hudon  

Edition: First 2011

ISBN: 978-050001569-6

Language: English  

Condition: Excellent. Clean copy with tight binding

Binding: Hardcover with dustjacket  

Pages: 224. Text with images 

Additional Information

How did prehistoric peoples those living before written records think? Were their modes of thought 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 either as 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. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naïve narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth. As this elegantly written, enlightening book so ably demonstrates, the prehistoric mind was in fact as complex and sophisticated as that of contemporary humans.

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.

James David Lewis-Williams is a South African archaeologist. He is best known for his research on southern African San rock art. He is the founder and previous director of the Rock Art Research Institute and is currently professor emeritus of cognitive archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Sam Challis is Head and Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, lecturing undergraduates in global hunter-gatherer and rock art studies, and advising graduates and postdocs

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Bushman | David Lewis Williams | San | Drakensberg | Images of Power | Rock Art