The production and exhibition of replicas of archaeological material were a very significant and serious enterprise by museums in the late nineteenth-century Europe. Replicas included plaster casts, watercolour copies, brass rubbings, paper mosaics, and from the 1850s onwards, photographs.
The San of southern Africa were hunter-gatherers, who subsisted by hunting animals and gathering plants. Women provided the staple plant foods and collected small animals and birds, while men hunted large animals. Living entirely off the land meant that they were nomadic and followed carefully planned annual routes (Biesele 1978).
Travellers along the scenic R58 between Aliwal North and Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape Province will notice the massive, flat-topped Kramberg Mountain to the south. It is an outlier of the magnificent Stormberg Mountain Range further south, itself part of the Drakensberg, South Africa’s longest and highest mountain range.
The Vredefort Dome in the Free State Province of South Africa is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its geological distinction. It is the largest and oldest impact crater on Earth and is named after the town of Vredefort. For further information regarding its geological importance, refer to the suggested readings below.
The depiction of buffalo (Syncerus caffer) in San rock art is extremely rare throughout southern Africa and as a result its role in San cosmology has not previously been considered in publication. However, the mere appearance of buffalo in San rock art suggests that there must be a motive for its portrayal since animals assume symbolic associations in human thought. San artists depicted animals because they have meaning. An example of this is the eland, which is a multifaceted symbol in San culture as it is associated with girls’ puberty rituals, boys’ first kill ceremonies, marriage rituals, rain-making and the practices of the religious specialist.