Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art

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How did ancient peoples - those living before written records - think Researchers over the years have believed their modes of thought fundamentally different from ours. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the San people of southern Africa - among the last hunter-gatherers on Earth - were viewed either as irrational fantasists or childlike, spiritual conservationists. New research has overturned these misconceptions. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. Comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, exist of interviews with San people who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of them. Using these and the analogy of the Rosetta Stone with its parallel texts, the authors move between the rock art and the San texts, teasing out the subtle meanings behind them both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a nave narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.

Reviews

'A marvellous book: scholarly, but wonderfully readable too' - Alan Barnard, University of Edinburgh
'Lewis-Williams and Challiss writing is direct and clear their scientific analysis is illuminated by sympathetic intuition' - Independent
'A fascinating book about a fascinating topic' - The Contemporary Review
'An elegantly written work ... a fascinating volume' - The Historical Association
'Fascinating, readable and beautifully illustrated' - British Museum Magazine
'An outstanding introduction to Bushman rock art and powerful testimony to the sophistication of its makers' - Peter Mitchell, University of Oxford
'[This book] reveals the extraordinary complexity of San imagination and the harsh but beautiful landscapes they inhabited. Weaving together a lifetimes study of paintings made by the San with accounts of their lives left by early European explorers and anthropologists, Deciphering Ancient Minds is a tour de force' - Graeme Barker, University of Cambridge

Author Bio

David Lewis-Williams is Professor Emeritus and Senior Mentor in the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg. Among his books are The Mind in the Cave, Inside the Neolithic Mind (with David Pearce) and The Shamans of Prehistory (with Jean Clottes).