Shaman Images in San Rock Art: A Question of Gender

Abstract

Conkey and Spector (1984) discussed androcentric biases and how certain assumptions about human behaviour underlie archaeological research.¹ They stressed that these assumptions must be examined and evaluated in the light of recent feminist research. Conkey and Williams continued in the 1990s to challenge the privileging of the commonly accepted techno-environmental model used in archaeology because of the tacit association of this type of data with male categories. Knowledge about archaeological reconstructions or interpretations involving gender in the past is, of course, closely related to the socio-political history of archaeology, with strong male bias firmly entrenched. Feminist enquiry has revealed problems about how archeologists have ‘gendered’ the past by applying stereotypical notions about men and women to specific kinds of artefacts and activities. This notion of a gender-specific ideology has roots, not in the generic prehistory of men and women, but in western European social institutions which may have emerged during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century: mainly the nuclear family and a gender-based division of labour.²

I am grateful to Professor David Lewis-Williams, Director of the Rock Art Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, for comments and discussion. I thank Professor John Parkington for his kind permission in using the redrawing of the rock art site from the Western Cape Province. All other redrawings are used courtesy of the Rock Art Research Unit. I also thank Kaye Reed of State University of New York at Stoney Brook for her animal identifications, along with the Jagger Library of the University of Cape Town who provided access to the Bleek and Lloyd manuscripts. Special thanks goes to Anne Holliday for her assistance in the rock art redrawings.