Wartrail I

Brief description of site: RSA-WAR1 Main Rock Shelter is a huge, elliptical shelter almost 100 m long with the main section 69.9 m long. The shelter is situated at the head of a side tributary and faces mostly SSW. A small waterfall spills from above in the western end of the shelter. The shelter is up to 7 m high and 12 m deep with an upper tier. The vast floor area has a lot of domestic stock dung overburden mixed with large exfoliated rock slabs.

In places the deposit is up to 2 m deep but not all of it is archaeological, being a mix of episodes of shelter collapse and flooding. There are 3 areas of stone walling - by herders and farmers for stock, most likely. The site has superb acoustics and sound travels very clearly within the shelter. There is also quite an echo down the valley. There are a few scattered stone tools - mostly opaline raw material, which would have come from volcanic pipe and which were washed into the river systems. There is one area of bone preservation and several pieces of undecorated grit-tempered pottery were noted.
Brief description of art: RSA WAR must have had many hundreds of San rock-paintings but severe calcite stains have obscured most of the art and only less than 50 individual rock paintings survive today; some of exceptional quality. The special-ness of RSA WAR1's rock-art was noted in the 1940s when Walter Battiss - then an agent of the Historical Monuments Commission - and Fred Hutchings, a stonemason, removed at least 2 panels of rock-art from RSA WAR Main Rock Shelter on January 8th 1941. These removed rock art panels are today housed in MuseumAfrica, Newtown, Johannesburg. The art remaining in the shelter remains of great interest:

Shamanic panel: Towards the western end of the shelter are at least 20 exceptionally finely painted and detailed figures in a 690 mm x 1200 mm image cluster or panel. There are at least 9 human figures. Unusually, they are painted in white with red and brown paint used as body decoration. This decoration takes the form of extremely fine, criss-crossing lines, of tassels on and off the body. Some of these human figures bend forward at the waist. There is a thin red line fringed with fine white dots that appears to be being 'played' by a human figure. One human figure has wings and feathers. There are a further 8 red human figures and a very strange white dog or pig-like animal with erect hairs.

Other paintings: These are scattered among the upper tier of the shelter and include eland, some white buck -possibly mountain rhebuck and fragments of human figures.