African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone.

David Coulson and Alec Campbell 

Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2001. 224 pp., 256 pp., 123 b/w illustrations & 183 color photos, 7 maps. $60 hardcover.

In the final three decades of the twentieth century, African rock art research transformed itself from a part-time hobby into a full-time professional pursuit dominated by an ethnographic understanding of the art. The discipline has matured into one where iconography, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuration theory, gender, and socio-politics are the topics of the day. Any book that is written for the public, as this one is, needs to bring across that maturity and complexity of thinking in such a way that it is digestible by nonspecialists, without trivializing the subject. To achieve this for southern Africa alone would require reading a great deal of the some thirty books (both academic and public), nearly three hundred academic articles, and the plethora of unpublished dissertations and theses that have appeared in the last twenty years. To achieve it for the whole of Africa would be even more daunting.

Nevertheless, this impressive-looking volume by David Coulson and Alec Campbell sets out to accomplish this task. With no new interpretative arguments advanced and with images almost all taken from previously discovered rock art sites, the book is intended to be a synthesis and evaluation of African rock art research in recent decades rather than an advance in current thinking. From the outset, the difficulties of the undertaking are apparent. Conventionally, there are two ways to structure such a book. The easiest way to do it is geographically, region by region, while the more difficult way is to do it thematically, pointing to similarities and differences across the regions. African Rock Art starts out thematically but then changes to a geographic structure without any reason being given or one being apparent from the text. The structural problems are exacerbated in places by the insertion of sections of travelogue and personal reflection. These sections are written from a first-person perspective; given that the book is co-authored and that these sections are unsigned, the reader walks away with the distinct impression that there is a parallel autobiographical text whose authorship is unknown. In other places, the book attempts to be a sort of field guide, offering advice to would-be visitors to rock art sites. In trying to be so many things, it is unnecessarily repetitive in places. These problems do not make African Rock Art unreadable, however, and the writing is clear enough for nonspecialists to understand.

The authors make a brave attempt at bringing across some of the complexity of African rock art, and yet there are some peculiar omissions whose presence would have strengthened and added interest to the text. They make no mention, for example, of the recent discovery, published in National Geographic magazine, of a small piece of incised ochre from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Between 75,000 and 100,000 years old, it is the oldest dated human-made image in the world, and points to an antiquity for African art far greater than had been thought possible. This indication that art (and probably rock art) might have originated in Africa is certainly important enough to warrant some discussion in a popular text.

The book would also have benefited by a consideration of more recent research. In talking about the generally distinct distribution of paintings and engravings, the authors rely on old and outdated material. Considerable published research--for example on the Limpopo River Valley--over the last decade shows a far greater interspersion of engravings and paintings than is shown on the map produced in this volume. The lack of consultation of more recent research leads to some factual errors. The authors claim, for example, that "archaeological finds and DNA tests suggest that direct ancestors of Bushmen once inhabited most of Africa's eastern lands, from the Red Sea to the Cape" Cp. 30). Recent research using DNA in fact shows no immediate ancestral relationship between the hunter-gatherer peoples of eastern and southern Africa; they are as genetically far apart as they possibly could be. It would also be extremely difficult to massage the archaeological evidence to support this argument.

A more significant limitation of the book is the cursory treatment of important debates. In places the authors assume, uncritically, one side of a contentious argument, without providing readers with the information about the other side. This is the case with the dating of North African rock art: instead of venturing into the very significant and interesting disagreement between Fabrizzio Mori and Alfred Muzzolini that lies at the heart of Saharan rock art research, they accept Mori's controversial dating scheme that gives the art greater antiquity than Muzzolini would allow. In itself, choosing one side of an argument is not a problem, but Coulson and Campbell position themselves as arbiters for other debates, particularly in southern Africa. As the book is intended to bring research conducted over the past few decades to the public's attention, this inconsistency detracts from what would have been the first overall synthesis of African rock art research in many years.

Nevertheless, the book's strength is clearly intended to be its images. Indeed, the authors state: "Is `writing' the correct word for compiling a book whose illustrations must say more than the words?" (p. 12). Such statements are deceptive; rock art does not speak for itself, and even photographs are representations that convey ideas about the art that are often problematic. If, as the authors accept, the art of the Sahara was made at a time when the area was more verdant, then images of the art in its present landscape--striking as they are--are misleading. Such philosophical issues, however, will hardly deter most readers, who will in all likelihood admire the images rather than wade through the text.

Indeed, as a volume intended to catch the eye with its striking photographs, African Rock Art is successful; while perhaps not in the same creative league as David Muench's superb rock-art-in-landscape images, the photography on the whole is very good. Unfortunately given the book's size and cost, there are too many images that are, oddly, out of focus (e.g., Figures 16, 37, 67, 119, 145). Whether the fault lies in the photography or the production process is unclear, but it mars an otherwise attractive volume.

Even with all these problems, interested readers will still want to own African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone because it is the first serious effort in many years at bringing the rock art of Africa together in a single volume. The sheer scope of its coverage and the spectacular images will give many people their first glimpse into one of the world's oldest, most extensive, and diverse art forms. The flaws noted above make the book less attractive as a synthesis and evaluation of African rock art as it presently stands. Given that it will be some time before another continental synthesis is accepted for publication, African Rock Art is disappointing not so much for what it is but for what it could have been.

GEOFFREY BLUNDELL, former deputy director of the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has conducted research on rock art in Africa, France, and the United States. He is presently completing his Ph.D. at the Institutionen for Arkeologi och Antik Historia, University of Uppsala.