Item RARI-HT-01-24HC.jpg - RARI HT 01 24HC

Brief description of site: This 'site' is, in fact, a series of rock-paintings located along 160 m of rocky krantz line. The general aspect is ENE to NE. There is dense vegetation and the floors of the shelters are mostly rock with pockets of flood-washed deposit. The bottom krantz stratum is a crumbly mudstone overlain with harder quatzitic sandstone. There are many areas where rock has collapsed, often forming shelters. 4 artificial driplines - installed by the Rudners in 1966/1967 are still visible in one of the shelters but their effectiveness is now zero.

A huge but 'messy living area with very few visible lithics because these are washed away by flooding and also trampled by cattle and sheep that walk along the rivers and shelter in the krantzes. There are numerous lower grindstone patches, indicative that this was once a major centre for the San of the area.
Brief description of art: The sites were visited by George William Stow, the early traveller, at some point in the 1860s or 1870s as there are three of his copies of the rock-paintings - one in Stow, G.W. & Bleek D.F. 1930. Rock-paintings in South Africa from parts of the eastern Province and Orange Free State. London: Methuen and two in: Rosenthal, E. & Goodwin, A.J.H. 1953. Cave artists of South Africa. Cape Town: A.A. Balkema (photocopies of Stow's copies attached). There are also 2 copies of Camp Siding's art in: Rudner, J. & Rudner, I. 1970. The hunter and his art: a survey of rock art in southern Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik. All of the above copies' original paintings are still intact and in a good condition.

Fenced outlier: The first site encountered is slightly apart from the others to the west and has been fenced in. This site's imagery is extremely faded with very little - bar a few eland and red human figures now being visible.

Medicine Dance Panel: The next set of paintings - on the main krantz proper - comprises a 1.9 m x 1.26 m extended treatment of a San Medicine or Trance Dance, almost exclusively in red pigment. Over 60 human figures are depicted dancing, clapping, bending forward, holding their arms above their heads and also behind their backs and so forth. Some of the human figures are in profile, including one unusual human figure that also has fine red lines painted coming off his body. These fine lines probably represent sweat. There is also a serpentiform motif with comb-like head. To the left above are eland, including one in unusual white-grey infill with red outline. Below these eland are two human figures in comparable pigment and with eland heads and unusual arrows.

Stow's 'shields': The double rows of over 40 'shields' copied by Stow are, in fact, the torsos of seated human figures. This 1.5 m x 0.78 m panel is on a hollow and outward sloping rock surface. It contains an elaborate depiction of a Medicine Dance with at least 4 human figures shown playing the gora or musical bow - a rare subject in the art. There are more than 42 human figures painted in two episodes - an earlier phase of red paint followed by an ochre, mustard, white and black painting phase. Both phases shop trancers, dancers and the Medicine Dance. There is also a tusked serpent that is painted as though emerging from a crack in the rock face. There are at least 4 eland (Tragelaphus oryx) and half-a-dozen smaller antelope.

Man and Eland Panel: Under a low overhang is a 1.7 m x 0.5 m panel in which a human figure holding three arrows appears to touch or 'chuck' an eland under its chin, though this may be the result of accidental juxtapositioning. The eland is painted in an unusual combination of yellow, red, black and white paints. There are at least 14 other eland painted in red & white and yellow & white and 7 human figures painted in white. There is also a large red rain-animal. Many fingerdots

History of the collection

The Tongue collection is currently split between two Institutions. The final colour copies, just over 100 in total, including those that were exhibited and published, are stored at the Iziko Museums of Cape Town. Tongue's original tracings and line drawings (some derived directly from Stow copies) are housed at the Rock Art Research Institute. A large number of these had originally been donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1921, but these were returned to the Rock Art Research Institute in South Africa in 1990s thanks to the farsighted vision of Professor Ray Inskeep. Read Less
Background of the Recorder

M. Helen Tongue was a school teacher at Rockland Girls' High during the 1890s and 1900s in the town of Cradock in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. It was here that she met Dorothea Bleek, daughter of famous San linguist and ethnographer, Wilhelm Bleek. The two travelled widely visiting rock art sites in the region. Tongue developed a direct contact tracing technique to record each image (both painted and engraved) in its exact proportions and in its relationship to other images as they appeared on the rock surface. In this way, she took an important step beyond the pioneer recording work of George Stow. Tongue's Eastern Cape copies are her earliest. Her first copy was made on a farm in Molteno District. In this early work, she worked alone. But, the bulk of her copies were made during three longer fieldtrips beyond the Eastern Cape border, together with Dorothea Bleek. At the beginning of 1906, Tongue and Bleek made a train trip from Cradock to Bloemfontein and Ladybrand (Free State), where they recorded various rock art sites. Most of the sites visited were located by using the descriptions of George Stow. A second expedition in the summer of 1906/07 took them through the Eastern Cape and into Lesotho. Their third and final expedition was by train to Fauresmith (Free State) and wagon to Luckhoff in the Karoo (Western Cape). In 1908 a selection of Tongue copies were exhibited at the South African Public Library in Cape Town and then at the Royal Anthropological institute in London. In 1909 a series of copies were brought together in a handsome portfolio of 54 plates and an accompanying book with two collotype plates and eight black-and-white photographs. Helen Tongue wrote descriptions for each site and each plate, Dorothea Bleek contributed "Notes on the Bushmen" and Henry Balfour wrote a preface. The book was titled "Bushman Paintings", it was Tongue's first and only rock art publication