Contains more than two hundred photographs of Africa's rock art, coupled with historical and interpretive analyses, compiled to raise public awareness of the variety, importance, and frailty of these works.

The only book of its kind to examine cave art throughout Africa. The paintings and engravings discovered in African caves are amazing works of art that hold clues to understanding the history of humankind.

It has long been known that all forms of art – rock paintings, carvings and scribings, and also portable sculpture – are present at various locations throughout Africa. This book was the first inclusive survey and brings together in one volume accounts of African rock art which were previously scattered in scholarly monographs, journals and travellers’ tales. The range of the coverage is geophysically comprehensive, from the Atlas Mountains to the Cape of Good Hope. The art styles are set into a firm chronological framework, and are displayed against a background of human, physical and cultural evolution. Considerable discussion is also devoted to the varied purposes which the paintings and carvings served in the communities which produced them, looking at the differing interpretations fully and fairly. A fascinating collection of illustrations, some in colour, truly reflects the variety of forms in which African rock art is manifested. Originally published 1984.

Rock paintings by the San Bushmen are scattered over all of southern Africa; it is estimated that some 15,000 rock art sites are known and possibly as many await discovery. While providing information about the history of these fascinating paintings—considered one of the greatest cultural treasures of humankind—this account also offers insight into their possible interpretations by taking the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town as a starting point. Filled with beautiful illustrations, this record sheds light on San rock art in general and makes sense of the baffling complexity and strangeness of the art form.

Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.

J. David Lewis-Williams is world renowned for his work on the rock art of Southern Africa. In this volume, Lewis-Williams describes the key steps in his evolving journey to understand these images painted on stone. He describes the development of technical methods of interpreting rock paintings of the 1970s, shows how a growing understanding of San mythology, cosmology, and ethnography helped decode the complex paintings, and traces the development of neuropsychological models for understanding the relationship between belief systems and rock art. The author then applies his theories to the famous rock paintings of prehistoric Western Europe in an attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of rock art. For students of rock art, archaeology, ethnography, comparative religion, and art history, Lewis-Williams' book will be a provocative read and an important reference.

An illustrated collection that takes stock of current knowledge and proposes a new way of reading indigenous art For thousands of years, nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence. Renaud Ego posits that the artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and,ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers. Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary,who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance.Visionary Animal is a translation of L’Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author’s photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.