Museums across the world have collections of fragments of rock paintings and engravings that have been removed due to concern over their damage or deterioration. As early as 1870, geologist and ethnologist George William Stow warned that rock art was “becoming obliterated very fast” (Jones 1870: 107). Stow and his fellow rock art enthusiast, Charles Sirr Orpen visited several sites in the then Orange Free State, making watercolour and charcoal copies of the art. So profound was their interest in the preservation of the rock art that they proceeded to remove certain painted panels from rock shelters.

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).