San rock art just got older
2004-02-06 06:39
Johannesburg - New radio-carbon dating technology shows some South African rock art to be three times older than previously believed, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom said on Thursday.
A study by archaeologists at the institution estimated that rock art at the World Heritage Site of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal could be three thousand years old.
Their age was originally put at one thousand years, university spokesperson Claire Jordan said in a statement to Sapa.
Archaeologists from the Australian National University in Canberra participated in the study.
"The findings, published in the current edition of the academic journal South African Humanities, have major implications for our understanding of how the rock artists lived and the social changes that were taking place over the last three millennia," Jordan said.
The mountainous uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region was considered to be one of the best areas in the world for rock art. It has the largest and most concentrated group of painting in Africa south of the Sahara, with over 40 000 paintings, said Jordan.
San hunter-gatherers, who settled in the area about eight thousand years ago, created the artwork using mainly black, white, red and orange pigments.
"Until recently, archaeologists have struggled to tell exactly how old the paintings were, mainly because dating techniques have required larger samples for analysis than it has been possible to collect without destroying the art work," said Jordan.
The research team were able to analyse salt samples taken from the painted rocks using a highly-refined radio-carbon dating technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry.
The results show some of the paintings are at least three thousand years old.
Jordan said: "Experts suspect they could be even older due to the San people's long occupation of the area but say they need to carry out further tests to prove this theory."
Dr Aron Mazel, a South African researcher based at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who carried out the work with Australian archaeologist Dr Alan Watchman, said: "This is a small but important step forward in the interpretation of some of the world's finest collection of rock art.
"We hope to use this technique to date more of the paintings and organise them in chronological order in the hope that, like a family photograph album, they can tell us a little more about how life evolved for the San people during the several thousands of years they occupied the mountains.
Dr Chris Chippindale, reader in archaeology at Cambridge University and professor with the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, said: "It looks as if the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg rock art sequence may be very long. Any new study which tells us reliably about its age is very much to be welcomed."
- SAPA