Aron Mazel
Unsettled Times: Re-evaluating Shaded Polychrome Paintings and the Social History of Hunter-Gatherers in the Southeastern Mountains of Southern Africa
Overview
Paintings of eland (photo: Aron Mazel)
The shaded polychrome paintings of the KZN Drakensberg range in southeastern southern Africa are some of the most vibrant and appealing examples of rock art known anywhere in the world. Shaded, in the majority, in one or two basic colours, with the rest shaded in three or four colours, the complexity of these paintings, including foreshortening and elements of perspective, resulted in their being dated at around a few hundred years old.
Aron Mazel has worked with rock art in the Drakensberg since 1979. Following periods of extended research across the mountain range, he has more recently returned to evidence concerning the shaded polychromes to argue that the paintings are in fact between 2,000 – 1,600 years old. Re-evaluating relationships between the shaded polychromes and hunter-gatherers, Mazel asks: why did the paintings occur at this particular time in history, and why did they later disappear for around 1,000 years?
Significantly changing the timeline for the paintings and paving the way for future research, Mazel’s article, ‘Unsettled Times’, is now a key reference for anthropologists, archeologists, art specialists and students across the globe.
Context
A procession of therianthropic figures (photo: Aron Mazel)
Drawing on over 30 years of experience the KZN Drakensberg, including first-hand work recording and documenting around 20,000 individual images in shelters across the region and the excavation of four rock shelters in the north and central areas, Mazel’s article collects and critically assess bodies of evidence that shed light on the chronology of the shaded polychromes, including:
- The relative sequencing of the paintings
- The AMS radiocarbon dating of the paintings and their associated crusts
- The ochre densities at Collingham Shelter
- The portable paintings found in Collingham Shelter and Cascades 2
- The relationship between the parietal and portable art
- Occupation history
- The timing of the hunter-gatherer occupation, with particular emphasis on the central and northern regions
Drawing on extensive rock art sequencing work done by Pager, Vinnicombe, Russell, Swart and Loubser and Laurens, alongside new data gathered by Mazel and Alan Watchman that dated rock-paintings over two phases, Mazel brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive range of research to support his arguments.
Outcomes
The suckling rebuck (photo: Aron Mazel)
In Unsettled Times Mazel puts forward new evidence to argue that the shaded polychrome paintings, with few exceptions, emerged around 2,000 years ago. As such, they occur in the middle of the KZN Drakensberg painted sequence, rather than the end.
Building on this exciting new understanding, Mazel goes on to question the role and relationship of the shaded polychromes to hunter-gatherers in the area. For example, he suggests that the paintings owe their emergence, at least in the northern KZN Drakensberg, to shifting populations. Pointing out that around 2,000 years ago agriculturists began to move in southern Africa and shortly thereafter settle in the central Thukela basin, areas previously occupied solely by hunter-gatherers, Mazel contends that hunter-gatherers used ritual activities and trance performance, including painting, as a way to try and ameliorate the social tensions caused by this sharing of land with a people who had substantially different worldviews and lifestyles. In other words, the emergence of the shaded polychrome tradition across the entire southeastern mountains region may be underpinned by social change.
Moreover, Mazel suggests that the disappearance of the paintings coincides with the hunter-gatherers later abandoning the mountains. When they returned, around 600 years ago, they no longer produced the shaded polychromes, save for a few exceptions.
Compelling us to think differently about the paintings themselves, and to further integrate information and patterns derived from the excavation deposits, Mazel’s research continues to ask new questions of the data, and to deepen our understanding of hunter-gatherer history.
I want to be Provoked: Participatory Design and the Rock Art on Mobile Phones Project
Overview
Dr Areti Galani (centre) with participants in a RAMP focus group meeting (photo: Aron Mazel)
There have been repeated attempts, dating back to the mid-1800s, to make the Neolithic and Early Bronze rock-art in Northumberland, England, open and accessible to the public. Now, for the first time, in situ interpretation via mobile phones is available.
The result of a two-year project, Rock Art on Mobile Phones (RAMP) allows visitors to access photographs, diagrams and commentaries concerning three of the most important sites for rock art in Northumberland on their mobile phones. In addition, the project’s innovative participatory approach has challenged existing archeological interpretation strategies and has argued for a more open, and potentially more meaningful, take on the design process.
Adding an extra dimension to the visitor experience, bringing rock art to new audiences and re-assessing the relationship between heritage experts and the public, the work of Aron Mazel and his colleagues, Areti Galani, Kate Sharpe and Debbie Maxwell, is of interest to those involved in heritage interpretation internationally.
RAMP was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (£150,848) and Newcastle University in 2010.
Context
Participants in a RAMP focus group meeting recording their experiences of visiting a rock art panel (photo: Aron Mazel)
There is long history of information about rock art being made open and accessible for public consumption. Up until the early 2000s a number of amateur archeologists undertook such work on a voluntary and self-funded basis. It is most notably the work of the independent archaeologist Stan Beckensall, however, whose large body of popular literature included grid references, directions and illustrations, which laid the foundations for two more recent projects: the ‘Northumberland Rock Art: Web Access to the Beckensall Archive’ or NRA, and the ‘Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot Project’ or NADRAP.
The NRA and NADRAP projects together provided open and unrestricted access to the location (including GPS co-ordinates) and description of more than 1,100 rock-art panels in Northumberland, supported by diagrams and photographs. Importantly, the NRA and NADRAP projects also revealed significant public interest in rock art, with the NRA website receiving in excess of 115,000 unique visitors, from 100 countries who visited more than 500,000 pages between 2005 and 2008.
Leading both the NRA and RAMP project, Mazel brought around 30 years experience of working with rock-art to the team. Building on his earlier success, the RAMP team held five one-day public workshops between September 2010 and March 2011, including site visits, storytelling and informal conversations, to explore possible content for the mobile phones. Involving 39 participants, Mazel and his colleagues gathered extensive documentation from these workshops, the analysis of which highlighted three important areas:
- Findability (or the ability to locate rock-art)
- The desire for ambiguity and speculation
- A sense of place and self (or a connection to the landscape)
Crucially, while an earlier NRA Audience Development Plan had suggested that the public would want to know about location, the desire for ambiguity and opportunities to connect with the landscape emerged only during the workshops for the RAMP project.
Outcomes
A screenshot of RAMP in action in the field
RAMP launched in July 2011 to excellent press reviews.
Fundamentally informed by the workshop findings, RAMP’s design and content aimed to ‘open up’ 6,000-year old rock art to as many visitors as possible. For example, noting that participants had difficulty locating specific rock-art panels at times, the team included an ‘Am I In The Right Place?’ text to confirm orientation, with diagrams to help visitors distinguish between the carvings and natural wood markings. As such, RAMP not only provided assistance in locating rock-art, but also, in providing a number of ‘tools’, helped visitors to engage with the carvings more thoroughly.
Importantly, the project also indicated that simply making existing archeological records available online does not guarantee a successful visitor experience. For example, in their article ‘I want to be Provoked’ Mazel and his colleagues point to the participants’ desire for the space to speculate, and even be challenged. As a result, RAMP moved away from the authoritative ‘guided tour’ approach, and instead developed interpretative content that was dialogical in nature, allowing for different perspectives and questions to emerge.
The approach taken by Mazel and his colleagues thus has a number of important consequences, not least that heritage experts may need to ‘let go’ and complement, rather than lead, visitors’ responses to rock-art. Critically informing the production of meaningful heritage interpretation, the project has encouraged us all to wonder: who made the rock-art found in Northumberland, and why?
Apartheid's Child: The Creation of the South African Cultural History Museum
Overview
Slave Lodge in Cape Town, which became the home of the South African Cultural History Museum (SACHM) in the 1960s (photo: Aron Mazel). In the 1960s, this building was known as the Old Supreme Court.
On the 1st October 1963 it was announced that the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town would be divided, and the South African Cultural History Museum (SACHM) was born.
In ‘Apartheid's Child’ Mazel contends that the creation of the SACHM was not only a profoundly political act, but one closely linked to the political changes made by members of the National Party (NP) and the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), which aimed to strengthen the ideological underpinning of Apartheid through a number of national institutions.
Setting out an array of documentary evidence, Mazel’s article reveals fresh insights into South African museum politics and the relationship between the state, Apartheid ideologues, and national cultural institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, significantly adding to a growing body of knowledge concerning the promotion of Apartheid at an institutional level.
The British Academy awarded Mazel £2,971 to carry out this research.
Outcomes
Senator van Zyl’s invitation to the opening of the SACHM
In ‘Apartheid's Child’, Mazel takes issue with previous explanations regarding the creation of the SACHM, which suggested that the primary motivation for the split from the SAM concerned increased storage space and popular public support. Putting forward a range of documentary evidence, he instead proposes that while calls for a cultural history museum can be traced back to the 1930s, the establishment of the SACHM was neither motivated by public pressure, although it existed, nor the desire for additional space, although this was a consideration.
Rather, he argues that the SAM Board was increasingly controlled by Afrikaner ideologues during the 1950s and early 1960s: men who were strongly connected to the National Party (NP) and the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB). Revealing the extent to which new appointments were politically driven, and highlighting the significant roles Board members had previously played in the promotion of white and Afrikaner culture in the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival, Mazel then charts a parallel change in aspiration: from the desire to display and house cultural history within the SAM to the creation of a fully fledged independent museum committed to the presentation of white South African and European history.
While noting that the political nature of cultural institutions has long been appreciated, and that the separation of the SAM into natural and cultural entities reflected a division that characterized many colonial museums globally, Mazel contends that the manner and timing of this particular separation made it a deeply political act intimately associated with the implementation of Apartheid.
As such, his research into the history and creation of the SACHM stands as a seminal example of how cultural institutions are deployed in support of ideological imperatives and will be of interest to historians, anthropologists and those working in museum studies and the humanities more broadly.