UMMAA curator Brian Stewart and colleague Sam Challis (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) recently published a paper, "Becoming elands’ people: Neoglacial subsistence and spiritual transformations in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, southern Africa," in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa.
The people in the Maloti-Drakensberg region are famous for the elaborate style of painting that developed there called shaded polychrome eland.
In the article, the authors attempt to understand the ecological and cultural conditions under which this style of rock art developed.
Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/0035919X.2023.2244923
Image caption: In Lesotho’s Sehlabathebe National Park is a painting of a ritual specialist heralding the potential dangers of a super-abundance of resources that concentrate seasonally at altitude (Challis 2019). Image courtesy of James Pugin.
