Painted Ridge: Rock art and performance in the Maclear District, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

A Painted Ridge is a book about the San (Bushmen) practice of rock painting. In it, DavidWitelson explores a suite of spatially close San rock painting sites in theMaclear District of South Africa's Eastern Cape Province. As a suite, the sitesare remarkable because, despite their proximity to each other, they sharepatterns of similarity and simultaneous difference. They are a microcosm thatreflects, in a broad sense, a trend found at other painted sites in SouthAfrica. Rather than attempting to explain these patterns chiefly in terms ofchronological breaks or cultural discontinuities, this book seeks to understandpatterns of similarity and difference primarily in terms of the performativenature of San image-making. In doing so, the bygone and almost unrecordedpractice of San rock art is considered relative to ethnographicallywell-documented and observed forms of San expressive culture. The approach inthe book draws on concepts and terminology from the discipline of performancestudies to characterise the San practice of image-making as well as tocoordinate otherwise disparate ideas about that practice. It is a study thataims to explicate the nuances of what David Lewis-Williams called the'production and consumption' of San rock art.