This was because heīegan to feel a great disjunction between what had learned as a social anthropology student and the then popular conception of San rock art as a childlike record of daily life with, perhaps, a few 'mythical' images thrown into the mix. In the early 1980s Lewis-Williams began to investigate other theoretical approaches. There is simply too much ambiguity in what the numerical values can be said to imply. The quantitative method now bears little impact on the understanding of meaning behind images in San rock art. His PhD, finished in 1977 and later published in 1981 as Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings., is regarded as a seminal text in rock art research globally. Overall he recorded some 4000 images for his doctoral thesis research. Thus, from the start of his career and in contrast to most scholars of the period, Lewis-Williams was looking at San rock art from a social anthropological perspective.įollowing proofs of an article by South African scholar Patricia Vinnicombe, shown to him in 1966 by Professor Ray Inskeep (then editor of the South African Archaeological Bulletin), Lewis-Williams used a quantitative method for the analysis of rock art images in the Drakensberg. Malinowski’s ideas specifically concerning the association of ritual with social products meant that Lewis-Williams could eventually challenge the idea that San rock art was merely a narrative of everyday life. Radcliffe-Brown (who started the department of social anthropology at UCT in 1920 but later returned as a visiting lecturer) and Monica Wilson, a student of Bronislaw Malinowski. During this time he received lectures from renowned social anthropologist A. Lewis-Williams was exposed to social anthropology as an undergraduate at UCT. He is the founder and previous director of the Rock Art Research Institute and is currently professor emeritus of cognitive archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). He is best known for his research on southern African San ( Bushmen) rock art. James David Lewis-Williams (born 1934) is a South African archaeologist. Rock Art Research that incorporates Ethnographyīelieving and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings.
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