Heritage Cases

There are many thousands of rock painting sites in southern Africa, particularly in the Maloti-Drakensberg region. During the 19th and most of the 20th century Western explorers and researchers proposed an aesthetic motivation for this painting, “art for art’s sake”, a simple narrative of the life of the people living in that landscape. Such simplistic view has been challenged, starting in the 1960s, by several researchers, the most prominent being David Lewis-Williams, by proposing a more complex scenario in which the paintings are charged with power, associated with the supernatural world and are an integral part of religious rituals (e.g., Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004). An important component of this interpretation is the possibility that rituals and dedicated practises might have extended beyond the act of painting itself to include also the more basic and technical aspects of the painting procedure, as the preparation of the paint and the decision of where in the landscape they should be located. Ethnographic data has provided some insights on these aspects. Marion How, for instance, reported that blood obtained from a freshly killed eland, and possibly fat too, was added to a particular type of glittering ochre to make paint (How 1970). Other animals might also have been used. However, beside these occasional passages reported in ethnographic and historical reports, little is known about how the material used for the paintings was prepared and there is no direct evidence that biological material from eland or other animals had indeed been used in such processes. In recent years we have undertaken detailed chemical characterization of the inorganic composition of Maloti-Drakensberg rock art paints (Bonneau et al. 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Hoerle et al. 2016). This research has provided much new insight into the composition and manufacture of rock art paints. Little, however, is yet known about the organic component of the paints. As part of a multidisciplinary approach aiming at further characterising the socio-cultural context within which the paintings were produced, we propose to investigate the presence of biological material in a set of paint samples attempting to recover and characterise the DNA present in the paint. A DNA bar-coding approach will be implemented, where different fragments of DNA from several markers from the mitochondrial DNA genome are amplified via PCR, the DNA sequence of these fragments determined and matched versus a dedicated database (http://www.boldsystems.org/; http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi) that allows for the identification of related species (Herbert 2003; http://www.barcodeoflife.org/).The database contains a vast collection of reference sequences that cover more than a million species (including almost 54,000 birds and more than 12,000 reptiles), a significant fraction being mammals (more than 83,000, including eland and several other African bovids). The DNA regions to be analysed have been standardised by the Bar Coding research community allowing for the identification of any species potentially present, without the need for analysis directed specifically to, say, the eland or any other species of interest. The work will be conducted in a forensic genetics laboratory to optimise DNA recovery, control for contaminations and remove PCR inhibitors, by researchers that are routinely involved in species identification via molecular analysis (Ferri 2009, 2015). We propose to conduct preliminary investigation using material collected from the Mount Tyndall 2 site, Maclear District, Eastern Cape Province. This important painted site has suffered severe conservation issues in recent years. Under various SAHRA and ECPHRA permits, I have collected 154 painted flaked of stone from the floor of the shelter (Pearce 2010). These are now catalogued in the collection of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, under catalogue number RP/2009/003. Light red, dark red and black paint is represented on these flakes. We propose to test a selection of these fragments via DNA analysis as described above. The fragmentary nature of the material is such that a reconstruction of the original scenes is not possible; this makes these samples the ideal material to test the feasibility of such approach. In addition, previous research on painted flakes from this site has provided detail of the inorganic composition of the paint (Bonneau et al. 2012) and nine direct radiocarbon dates have been produced for painted flakes and parietal paintings in this site (Bonneau et al. 2011, 2017a, 2017b). These existing data will provide important context for any genetic data that is recovered. We have also undertaken detailed micro-stratigraphic work on painted flakes from the site (Hoerle et al. 2016) which may provide insights into preservation of organic materials in the paint. I therefore apply to temporarily export ten flakes of painted stone to Professor Cristian Capelli at the University of Oxford for DNA analysis. The type of work proposed cannot be undertaken in South Africa. Once the analysis is complete, the flakes will be returned to the Republic. I propose to hand-carry the objects to the UK on 16 October 2018. If this pilot study is successful, it will open the way to understanding the organic constituents of rock art paints which may have played important roles in hunter-gatherer ritual. References Bonneau, A., Brock, F., Higham, T., Pearce, D. G. and Pollard, A. M. 2011. An improved pretreatment protocol for radiocarbon dating black pigments in San rock art. Radiocarbon 53(3):419–428. Bonneau, A., Pearce, D. G. and Higham, T. 2016. Establishing a chronology of San rock art using paint characterization and radiocarbon dating. In Gutierrez, M. et Honoré, E. (eds) L’art rupestre d’Afrique, Actualité de la recherche, Actes du colloque International Paris, 15 au 17 Janvier 2014, Université Paris 1, Centre Panthéon et Musée du Quai Branly:245–251. Nanterre: Editions l’Harmattan. Bonneau, A., Pearce, D. G. and Pollard, A. M. 2012. A Multi-technique characterization and provenance study of the pigments used in San rock art, South Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science 39:287–294. Bonneau, A., Pearce, D. G., Mitchell, P., Arthur, C., Higham, T., Lamothe, M. and Arsenault, D. 2014. Comparing painting pigments and subjects: the case of white paints at the Metolong dam (Lesotho). In Scott, R. B., Braehmans, D., Carremans, M. and Degryse, P. (eds) Proceedings of the 39th International Symposium on Archaeometry, Leuven, Belgium:319–323. Leuven: Centre for Archaeological Sciences. Bonneau, A., Pearce, D., Mitchell, P., Staff, R., Arthur, C., Mallen, L., Brock, F. and Higham, T. 2017a. The earliest directly dated rock paintings from southern Africa: new AMS radiocarbon dates. Antiquity 91:322–333. Bonneau, A., Staff, R., Higham, T., Brock, F., Pearce, D. and Mitchell, P. 2017b. Successfully dating rock art in southern Africa using improved sampling methods and new characterization and pretreatment protocols. Radiocarbon 59(3):659–677. Ferri, G., Alù, M., Corradini, B., Licata, M. and Beduschi, G. 2009. Species identification through DNA barcodes. Genet Test Mol Biomark 13:421–426. Ferri, G., Corradini, B., Ferrari, F., Santunione, A.L., Palazzoli, F. and Alù, M. 2015. Forensic botany II, DNA barcode for land plants: Which markers after the international agreement? Forensic Sci Int Genet 15:131–136. Herbert, P.D.N., Cywinska, A., Ball, S.L. and de Waard, J.R. 2003. Biological identifications through DNA barcodes Proc R Soc London B 270:313–321. Hœrlé, S., Pearce, D. G., Bertrand, L., Sandt, C. and Menu, M. 2016. Imaging the layered fabric of paints from Nomansland rock art (South Africa). Archaeometry 58:182–199. How, M.W. 1970. Mountain Bushmen of Basutoland. Johannesburg: van Schaik. Lewis-Williams, J. D. and Pearce, D. G. 2004. San Spirituality: Roots, Expression, and Social Consequences. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Pearce, D. G. 2010. Conservation and management of collapsing rock paintings: three sites in Maclear District, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 65:96–103.