Special and Rare Collection

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    The age and meaning of the paintings
    (Fosbrooke, 1950) Fosbrooke, Henry A.
    When describing Rock Paintings one is invariably asked two questions: what is their age and what is their meaning? No satisfactory answer can be given to either question. Regarding age, battle royal was recently joined in the South Africa Archaeological Bulletin between J. F. Schofield (31) and the Abbe Henri Breuil (8). The writer is not competent to comment on this clash of the giants, suffice it to say that the former will only admit to an age for the South African paintings in terms of centuries, whilst the latter thinks in terms of millennia. The issue will probably not be decided before a great deal more excavation has been done and perhaps Tanganyika, a late-comer in the Prehistoric Painting field, may be able to provide evidence vital to a decision in this matter. For as Dr. Leakey points out in Section 4 there is a possibility that the occurrence of painting on a small piece of rock in a particular horizon may give an association with a particular Stone Age culture, which in turn would bring as a step nearer to assigning an accurate date to the particular style of painting so found. But on the admittedly dangerous ground of stylistic comparison with some examples of North African art, e.g. as recorded by Frobenius (14) and as recorded and dated by Myers (25) and considering the arguments put forward by the Abbe Breuil (8) for an early dating of South African paintings, it seems safe to say that some of our Tanganyika paintings probably date back for thousands rather than hundreds of years. To the question “ What is the meaning of the paintings ” there is probably not one but many answers; a consideration of what does not, } as well as what does, appear in primitive art is necessary in attempting to answer this question. In the whole of the series, from the earliest to the latest, there is no single representation of a domestic animal; there is a paucity of carnivora though the occasional feline appears, as at Tlawi X (D.22) and hyaena at Tura (D.6). The dominant motiff is the type of animal commonly used for food in primitive hunting communities, buck, buffalo, elephant, rhino and ostrich.