The Impact of Contact and Colonization on Indigenous Worldviews, Rock Art, and the History of Southern Africa "The Disconnect"

The archaeological record undergoes a dramatic shift in appearance whenever indigenous peoples encounter incoming populations-whether in the form of economy, politics, or identity. Rock art in southern Africa testifies to successive interactions among hunter-gatherers, incoming African herders, African farmers, and, later, European settlers. New subject matter, however, is not simply incorporated into the preexisting tradition. Without exception, the many rock arts that depict novel motifs are made differently from the "traditional corpus, " usually rougher in appearance (in both paintings and engravings), more dynamic, or made with vivid and chalky paints. The drop in pigment quality is likely owing to the disruption and ultimate decimation of indigenous groups and the subsequent breakdown in trade and social communications-the Disconnect. The shifts in manners of depiction and the ways in which motifs are treated owe more, it seems, to the increasingly heterogeneous and creolizing membership of the art-producing people and the mixing of their cosmologies, albeit with specific cultural survivals. Precolonial contact images speak to a multitude of interactions and entanglements in ways that can inform the archaeological record, and colonial-era rock art constitutes a major component of the historical archive, an emic, agentive artifact that offers a reverse gaze from an indigenous perspective.