Exposing ‘hidden’ rock art

There’s an opportunity to see rock art as it hasn’t been seen before.

Dr Jeremy Hollmann will deliver a speech on the digital imaging of rock art at Roedean School in Parktown on 6 March.

Hollmann has been studying rock art since the late ’80s and has authored several research papers on the subject.

He is the author of Customs and Beliefs of the /Xam Bushmen, and completed his doctorate in 2011 on a complex of engraved hills in North West Province that were the focus of Khoisan initiation rituals.

Now, Vaalekop Shelter, a small and sparsely painted rock art site on the upper reaches of the Mooi River in KwaZulu-Natal, will soon be flooded by the construction of the Spring Grove Dam downstream.

The site was photographed using a digital imaging process, developed by Kevin Crause called Capture, Process, Enhance and Display (CPED).

The programme provides different views of the art – an all-round view of the painted rock surfaces and their surrounds, a high-resolution mosaic of the painted rock surface, and enhancements of the painted rock surface that reveal details of the art not visible to the naked eye.

These innovations change how rock art is viewed. Instead of the traditional approach to rock art photography, in which many separate images of the paintings are recorded, CPED takes the painted rock surface as the basic unit of analysis and users may zoom in and out of the high-resolution mosaic image, depending on the level of detail required.

Hollmann has worked at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.