SITUATING ROCK ART WITH SOCIETY

The Wildebeest Kuil rock art site sits adjacent to the historical site of the late 19th century Half-Way House hotel, a hotel whose story essentially relates to the Kimberley diamond rush of the 1870s. While my dissertation research primarily investigates the imperial actions deriving from the diamond rush and therefore does not centre on the adjacent rock art site, I have nonetheless come to spend much time at Wildebeest Kuil over the course of the several years during which I prepared for and conducted my dissertation fieldwork excavation. During the period of excavation in particular, which extended between June and October of 2005, I worked very closely with a number of Platfontein community members who ran the rock art centre and I spent a considerable amount of time almost every day interacting with tourists, learners, locals and educators who stopped in to visit the site. Many of these conversations gave me the impetus to reflect on the public meaning of the site. Specifically, in conversations with visitors, because I was excavating a late 19th century hotel, I often pointed out the relationship between the past of the rock engravings and these more recent pasts. The site of Wildebeest Kuil is particularly interesting for the overlap between all its various histories throughout the 19th century such as that of a local San uprising that quite likely made use of Wildebeest Kuil as a hide-out in the late 1850s and the late 19th century hotel and tavern that I was excavating, which certainly overlapped with the various initials and dates carved into the same rocks that contain San imagery from thousands of years ago (Morris, this volume).

In keeping with many of the questions that have been raised in rock art studies in recent years about the centrality of historical particularism (Thomas 2000: 289), I tended initially to think about trying to forge a more substantial link between all these various histories that could be drawn out of the site as a whole.