It was not until the late 1920s that Dorothea once again turned her full attention to rock art. Sandwiched between the trips to Angola in 1925 and Tanganyika in 1930 was the three-month ‘cave journey’ she took to sites recorded years earlier by Stow. The expedition, which culminated in her 1930 edited book of Stow's copies as well as a lecture delivered to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science (SAAAS) in 1932, provided evidence to confirm views she had already expressed in her 1909 collaborative book with Helen Tongue.

This chapter discusses continuities in Dorothea's thinking about rock art and locates her arguments within broader intellectual currents of the time. It suggests that her negative feelings about modernity may have influenced how she structured her research of sites, and the ways in which she responded to debates about the authorship and meaning of rock art. It draws on her introduction and notes in Rock Paintings in South Africa from Parts of the Eastern Province and Orange Free State, and on the published version of her presidential address to the SAAAS meeting in 1932. Titled ‘A Survey of Our Present Knowledge of Rockpaintings in South Africa’, the lecture presented a synthesis of Dorothea's rock art scholarship up to that point, and delivered her findings regarding authorship, age and meaning of the art, assertions that were sometimes at odds with the ideas of other specialists of the day. These two public texts are analysed alongside her field notebooks, her private correspondence and other writings dealing with rock art. All are situated within the wider thinking around archaeology and prehistory, and provide a texture of Dorothea's interactions with the internationally known prehistorians who passed through Cape Town during the 1920s. Dorothea's renewed interest in rock art late in the 1920s was no mere coincidence, but a response to the intellectual climate.