San Rock Art

4. Threads of light

64 4 Threads of light The duplicated and reversed figure that now stands in the centre of the South African coat of arms is in the lower centre of the Linton panel. That position, of course, results from the way the slab was chiselled from the rock face. The whole panel was but part of a much larger panorama of paintings across the wall of the shelter. If the removed section is viewed as a whole, the standing figure is by no means prominent: there are at least four human figures that are considerably larger than it, and there are also some large, striking images of eland. But the figure was, for the San, not an insignificant, isolated part of the panel. As I have pointed out, it is linked to numerous other images by the thin red line on which it stands and which bends around its feet. This line, for the most part fringed with white dots, is clearly crucial to any understanding of what the painter, or painters, were trying to create with not just one but rather a whole range of images. What 65 are the principal characteristics of the line? Attheleftsideof thepanel,ayoungelandisdepicted walking along the line, which then enters the back of the neck of a supine human figure that has antelope hoofs (Fig.2A).A short section of line joins this figure’s left arm to a foreleg of another eland. Another section of the line comes from the figure’s right ankle to the same eland’s left hind leg, around which it appears to wrap. A small rhebok antelope stands on this section of the line; it bleeds from the nose. The line leaves the eland’s leg and heads in the direction of another eland, but some flaking of the rock prevents us from seeing its entire length. Then the line leaves a front hoof of that eland and runs down to the top of the head of an elaborate standing human figure. It leaves this figure through its mouth and then bifurcates. One part runs down to the coat of arms figure and then on towards the right. The upper section runs via some animated human figures to the left arm of a second supine figure which is comparable to the one at the left of the panel. It wraps around the arm of this figure and then again branches, one section going down to join the lower part of the line, which sharply doubles back, while the other runs off the right edge of the rock slab. In some sections the feature is reduced to a series of parallel white dots, the central red line being omitted. In other sections, the white dots appear to have been omitted 66 (the parts that have only intermittent dots may be a result of the white paint flaking off, as it tends to do, though I consider this unlikely, the whole panel being so well preserved). We can say that the line, viewed overall, seems to act as a path and as a rope or cord that wraps around limbs. In some other sites, human figures grasp the line with both hands. In addition, the way it enters and leaves humans and animals defies any naturalistic explanation: it seems to change character from something real to something unreal. We must surely conclude that the line does not depict anything in the material world. But what effect does the line have on the panel as a whole? Whatever it may be, the line shows us that apparently unrelated images some distance from one another were, in ways that we may not at present fully understand, related. We can go a step further. The line suggests that the whole apparently jumbled Linton panorama, even if it was painted by more than one artist, is a conceptual unity. Certainly, it cannot be said to be a series of disparate vignettes of daily life, as some of the early rock art researchers may have supposed. Moreover, the line is not unique to the Linton panel: it is painted throughout the south-eastern mountains, that is, the Maloti of Lesotho and the Drakensberg of South Africa. In other parts of the subcontinent, such 67 as the Cederberg, a comparable line is also sometimes found, though less elaborately painted. Rather than being an idiosyncratic invention of a single painter’s imagination, the line represents a...