Becoming elands’ people: Neoglacial subsistence and spiritual transformations in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, southern Africa

Abstract

With new direct dates from rock paintings comes an unprecedented opportunity to relate excavated archaeological data to the parietal record in southern Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains. Anchoring dated art to recovered palaeoenvironmental, faunal and technological data enables the incorporation into socioecological models of ideational inferences, affording insights into how hunter-gatherers perceived their mountain habitats. Of particular interest is the late Holocene Neoglacial (∼3.5–2 kcal BP), during which skilled paintings were being made just as the region experienced dynamic changes owing in part to climate change. Responses of local foragers are evident across a range of cultural spheres, including dramatic subsistence transformations. With the Maloti-Drakensberg’s well-known “traditional corpus” of fine-line art now known to extend back to at least 3 kcal BP, here we explore how such changes may have precipitated – and in turn been influenced by – ontological shifts in relation to the food quest. As desirable game declined and hunting windows narrowed, we suggest that Neoglacial foragers sought to manage scheduling and social conflicts through enhanced spiritual negotiation with non-human entities in the landscape. Facilitated by the supernaturally charged nature of their elevated cosmos, this intensified spiritual labour may have found material expression in an elaborate new style of painting.

Keywords:

• Maloti-Drakensberg
• shaded polychromes
• Neoglacial
• intensification
• environmental ontology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank Peter Mitchell and Adrian Parker for generously making the Likoaeng palaeoenvironmental and zooarchaeological data available. Donald Guy and the late Rethabile Mokhachane provided key insights into contemporary eland migration and aggregation behaviours in the Underberg-Sehlabathebe region. Three anonymous reviewers made useful comments that helped strengthen this paper, for which we are grateful. We thank the Kingdom of Lesotho’s Department of Culture for ongoing permitting and support. With deep appreciation we also acknowledge the seminal work of Patricia Vinnicombe and Patrick Carter, whose initial vision of an intertwined parietal and excavated archaeological record in the Maloti-Drakensberg we hope is finally beginning to be realised.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.