Posted on 02/06/2004 12:08:03 PM PST by blam
SA rock art older than thought
Friday February 06, 2004 11:23 - (SA)
New radio-carbon dating technology shows some South African rock art to be three times older than previously believed, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom said.
A study by archaeologists at the institution estimated that rock art at the World Heritage Site of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal could be 3,000 years old.
Their age was originally put at 1,000 years, university spokeswoman Claire Jordan said in a statement to Sapa.
Archaeologists from the Australian National University in Canberra participated in the study.
"The findings, published in the current edition of the academic journal South African Humanities, have major implications for our understanding of how the rock artists lived and the social changes that were taking place over the last three millennia," Jordan said.
The mountainous uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region was considered to be one of the best areas in the world for rock art.
It has the largest and most concentrated group of painting in Africa south of the Sahara, with over 40,000 paintings, said Jordan.
San hunter-gatherers, who settled in the area about 8,000 years ago, created the artwork using mainly black, white, red and orange pigments.
"Until recently, archaeologists have struggled to tell exactly how old the paintings were, mainly because dating techniques have required larger samples for analysis than it has been possible to collect without destroying the art work," said Jordan.
The research team were able to analyse salt samples taken from the painted rocks using a highly-refined radio-carbon dating technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry.
The results show some of the paintings are at least 3,000 years old.
Jordan said: "Experts suspect they could be even older due to the San people's long occupation of the area but say they need to carry out further tests to prove this theory."
Dr Aron Mazel, a South African researcher based at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who carried out the work with Australian archaeologist Dr Alan Watchman, said: "This is a small but important step forward in the interpretation of some of the world's finest collection of rock art.
"The data will contribute to a much wider understanding of one of the key periods in South African and world history, the occupation of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg by the San hunter-gatherers.
"We hope to use this technique to date more of the paintings and organise them in chronological order in the hope that, like a family photograph album, they can tell us a little more about how life evolved for the San people during the several thousands of years they occupied the mountains.
"We are still in the early stages of exploiting this new technology but it's possible further investigation could reveal that some of the paintings could be even older than 3,000 years, especially as we knew the San people first occupied the area 8,000 years ago."
Dr Chris Chippindale, reader in archaeology at Cambridge University and professor with the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, said: "Dating is important to all archaeology and rock art has proved very hard to date.
"It looks as if the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg rock art sequence may be very long. Any new study which tells us reliably about its age is very much to be welcomed."
Sapa
Nah. The Tocharians and the other folks on the steppes who domesticated the horse gave us slacks/pants.
As long as you're not a Pepsi executive.
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