ROCK PAINTINGS OF SOUTH AFRICA: REVEALING A LEGACY
STEPHEN TOWNLEY BASSETT
DAVID PHILIP
Published Price : R 275.00

This is a splendid book. Stephen Townley Bassett has produced a remarkable work of 58 plates of colour reproductions of San/Bushman rock art and a series of theoretical essays on specific paintings by specialists in this field.

He follows in a tradition of copyists of Southern African rock art, starting with George Stow in the 1870's and continuing with Patricia Vinncombe, Harald Pager and Stephen's own uncle, R.Townley Johnson. This tradition has culminated in Stephen Bassett who has set new standards of excellence.

Using a combination of methods, including tracing, photography, and attention to detail using field microscopes and dentists' glasses, he has been able to reproduce detail and colour in both the paintings and the rock surface to exacting standards. Detail which is invisible to the naked eye comes alive in his reproductions. In extraordinary alchemical transformations the paintings live again. This is what prompted him to call the book "Revealing a legacy", for it is his incredibly close analytic work which allows some of these paintings to be be fully revealed from the veil of thousands of years of weathering and deterioration.

He is clearly totally devoted to the integrity of the original art. Archaeologist Royden Yates tells the story of pointing out to Stephen some missing detail in one of Stephen's reproductions. Shortly afterwards Stephen traced the buyer, took the painting out of the frame and drove the three hours to the site of the painting in the Cedarberg to closely inspect the work and insert the missing fragments of detail. It is this commitment and creative obsessiveness which are clearly evidence in his work.

In his book he indicates that there have been three areas of rock art which have preoccupied him over the last twelve years of field work. These were to reproduce copies of the art to a level of accuracy which would in fact create historical documents, to explore the use of natural pigments and painting materials used by the San, and to develop skills around the removal of graffitti.

In the second of these he has also made a major contribution. In all the reproductions he has used natural pigments, emulsifiers and binders which he has found in the field. These include ochres, animal fat, blood, eggs, plant resins, saliva, gall, charcoal, and for the colour white, raptor droppings. Not only has this added a look and feel which corresponds to the originals but by entering imaginately into the world of the San artist he has made an important contribution to helping us understand what materials the San artists might have used. Research currently underway at Natal University explores the possibility that the San artists used vulture faeces for the white colouring in the painting. This is some confirmation of Bassett's imaginative and intuitive field work. As Professor Pippa Skotnes of the University of Cape Town has written in her foreword to this book, "Through Stephen's work and experiences, we have a better understanding of the potential for materials themselves to be a site of meaning, and of the mutual embeddedness of process and product."

Stephen Bassett has brought a unifying link to the book by asking five archaeologists to contribute short theoretical essays on specific paintings. Diverse theoretical viewpoints provide interesting juxtapositions while specific paintings do seem more amenable to certain interpretations. Paintings depicting trance experience are interpreted by David Lewis-Williams, a painting depicting female initiation is explored by Anne Solomon, water imagery in one painting is analysed in terms of San/Nguni interaction by Frans Prins, and further informative analyses are provided by Sven Ouzmen, Edward Eastwood, and Royden Yates. This is an excellent book and anyone with an interest in Southern African rock art should own one.

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