Скачать или смотреть SOUTH AFRICA: VALUABLE ROCK ART COLLECTION TO BE HELD BY MUSEUM

(9 Oct 1997) English/Nat

One of the most valuable collections of rock art in the world is to be presented on Thursday to the University of the Witwatersrand for safe-keeping.

The J-D Roberts-Pager collection is a complete record of paintings done inside caves thousands of years ago.

The rock paintings done by San people or Bushmen between three hundred and two thousand years ago were painstakingly recorded thirty years ago by Austrian artist, Harald Pager (pronounced Porger).

Pager and his wife lived in the caves of the Ndedema Gorge in the Drakensberg Mountains for two years to do the work.

He photographed every painting in the valley in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal and produced life-sized replicas by photographing the rock face in square metre sections.

The photographs were then enlarged to life-size and Pager returned to the caves with them and coloured them with oil paints.

He then assembled the photographs along the rock and glued together a life-size mosaic.

The paintings are difficult to date because modern carbon dating techniques have proved ineffective.

But researchers are convinced that most of the paintings are at least two thousand years old.

The colour in the original paintings came from ochres for red, specularite for black and kaolin clay for white.

The paints were bound together by the blood and fat of wild animals.

Professor David Lewis Williams, director of the San Heritage Centre at Witwatersand University believes the addition of the collection to the Centre has made it the largest rock art archive in the world.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"It is of world class. People come from all over the world to see it. Probably there is no rock art anywhere in the world that is as detailed, as finely done, as small, beautifully done as this rock is."
SUPER CAPTION: Professor David Lewis Williams, Director of the San Heritage
Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand

Professor Lewis Williams says that the new collection is one of the most important in the world.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"It is of absolute world importance and it's as important as say the rock art in the French caves -- the Upper Paleolithic art. The collection is unique and since it was made in the 1960s a large number of individual paintings have disappeared through natural
causes. So this is the only record we have of those paintings."
SUPER CAPTION: Professor David Lewis Williams, Director of the San Heritage
Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand

Later this month Professor Lewis Williams will give a series of lectures on this work at the School of American Research at Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Since Pager did his work as many as half of the paintings in some areas have disappeared mainly due to high rainfall in the region.

Pager's photographs were stored for decades in long tubes and had virtually disintegrated over time.

They were restored over a period of two years by a South African museum worker in Pretoria.

The area now known as South Africa has produced many types of evidence of inhabitation by early human kind.

Fossils were discovered in caves outside Johannesburg two years ago providing the
first evidence that members of the human family lived there three and a half (m) million years ago.

Sterkfontein is the world's richest ancient hominid site.

Since 1936 when evidence of the first member of the human family was found there, the site has yielded another 700 hominid fossils and 600-thousand fossils of other animals.

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