Images include baboon, birds, buffalo, eland, elephant, felines, giraffe, human figures, lizard, ostrich, rhinoceros, warthog and zebra (Ouzman, 1996:41). Thaba Sione has been a primary focus for archaeologists as there are 559 identified engraved images located on or close to the hill site showing a wide variety of depictions. A comparison of rock art imagery at Thaba Sione and the ethnographic accounts of the |Xam and !Kung show strong similarities in belief systems pertaining to shamanism (Ouzman, 1996:39). ’hoan, contemporary cultural groups who live to the north of Thaba Sione in Botswana and Namibia. Additionally, they are likely to have been similarly comparable to the !Kung and Ju It is thought that the population of Thaba Sione were similar in social, economic and cultural terms to the now extinct |Xam, a cultural group who inhabited the central interior of South Africa and for whom we have extensive ethnographic accounts. Situated close to a waterhole it has been proposed that Thaba Sione was selected specifically by the San|Bushmen for rain-making beliefs and practices, but appears to have been modified as a result of Bantu-speaking farmers moving into the area from around 1500 years ago. However, the rock art at Thaba Sione is attributed to San|Bushmen and widely understood to reflect a shamanic belief system. Rock art of the last 2,000 years correlates with a number of different cultural groups such as farmers, pastoralists, hunter-gatherers etc. Interestingly, one third of all the stones that he been rubbed by rhinoceros are also engraved (Lewis-Williams & Blundell, 1998:111).ĭating rock engravings is always problematic, and the imagery at Thaba Sione has been estimated to fall within a broad estimate of between 1,200 - 10,000 years old (Ouzman, 1995:55). The hill is bounded by 27 standing stones that have been rubbed smooth by rhinoceros after wallowing in the muddy waterholes of the river (Ouzman, 1996:40). It is scattered with more than 450 engraved dolerite boulders with the seasonal Thlakajeng River running 350 metres south-west containing numerous waterholes. Thaba Sione (Zion’s Hill) a low hill of less than nine metres in height is an important archaeological and rock art site in the North West province. One particular site named Thaba Sione in South Africa, is primarily known for its numerous engravings of rhinoceros and may have been chosen as an engraving site because rhinoceros were known to have frequented the site. However, what does exist indicates that rhinoceros were of supernatural importance to certain groups of San|Bushmen (Ouzman, 1996:42). There are very few references to rhinoceros in San|Bushman ethnography. These shared features include: a selected range of animals, unusual body postures in human figures, complex ‘scenes’ and non-realistic features on both animals and humans such as the addition or absence of limbs, conflation of human and animal morphology and exaggerated attributes (Ouzman, 1996:36) These features are critical to our understanding of the images as they are inextricably tied in to San|Bushman belief systems. Both painted and engraved images share certain distinctive traits which suggest that both art forms were the result of a single belief system. Most rock art researchers consider the engravings of San/Bushmen, like paintings, to have been influenced by shamanism (Ouzman, 1996:36).
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