Dr Sam Challis is Head and Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. Along with Professor David Pearce [Rock Art, Dating], Dr Catherine Namono [Rock Art, Collections] and Professor David Lewis-Williams, Professor Emeritus [Rock Art, Mentor], RARI is dedicated to the discovery and protection of South Africa’s rock art heritage. Dr Sam Challis and Dr Catherine Namono are both members of the Rock Art Network.

The Institute endeavours to convey to the public and academic community, the complexity, subtlety, and social value of South African and African rock arts in terms of indigenous beliefs, customs, rituals and life-ways. It also aims to teach and train future scholars and technicians to further the understanding and appreciation of rock art and to conserve it for generations to come. RARI strives to record Africa’s fast-vanishing rock art heritage using all techniques at its disposal and to make these records available to the world via the online digital archive, SARADA.

Many experts describe the rock art of this area as the finest in the world, however, it is now known for more than just its beauty. Over 35 years of research at the Institute has contributed to making southern African rock arts some of the best-understood in the world. Using knowledge of indigenous beliefs, researchers have shown that the art played a fundamental part in the religious lives of its painters. The hunter-gatherer art captured things from the San's spirit world behind the rock-face: the other world inhabited by beings of all sorts, to which dancers could spirit-travel, and in which ritual specialists could draw power and bring it back for healing, controlling rain and ‘taming’ wild game animals. The art of herders and African farmers can also be linked to religious experience, particularly the initiation practices of girls and boys. Art of the colonial period was often created by mixed groups comprising all of the above who sought to resist and negotiate their space under Dutch and, later, British rule.

As the Institute has grown, it has sought to serve multiple regions of the African continent. Currently projects are underway in all South African Provinces as well as in Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya. The SARADA digital archive houses collections from several of these nations.

This new research is rich in its diversity; it includes the rock arts of San and Pygmy hunter-gatherers, Khoe and Nilotic pastoralists, as well as of African farmers such as the Chewa and the Northern Sotho, and the rock art of mixed raiding groups. Underpinning this diverse research is a focus on the complex symbolism of African image-making. In particular, the Institute seeks to understand, through rock art, how people in Africa perceived and responded to social changes during the last ten thousand years and through the colonial process; in this manner the Institute strives to produce a history of the continent that is based on African perceptions rather than just colonial records.

The Bradshaw Foundation has been involved with RARI for nearly two decades, sharing research carried out by the Institute. In 2007 Damon de Laszlo, Chairman of the Bradshaw Foundation, and Peter Robinson, its Editor, joined Dr Ben Smith, then Head of RARI, in a rock art expedition in the Drakensberg Mountains visiting numerous sites.

Visit the RARI website for more information on research, the rock art of Africa, public rock art sites, collections, about RARI, resources and staff & students.

→ South Africa Rock Art Archive
→ South Africa Rock Art Gallery
→ San Rock Art of the Drakensberg
→ RARI - Rock Art Research Institute
→ ARADA - African Rock Art Digital Archive
→ San Rock Art of the Drakensberg
→ Africa's World Heritage Sites
→ SARAP: Southern African Rock Art Project
→ A Map from the Memory of the World
→ Explore Cederberg rock art from your home
→ Early masterpieces: San hunter-gatherer shaded paintings of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg
→ A Painted Treasure
→ Origins Centre
→ Animals in Rock Art
→ Reflecting Back: 40 Years Since ‘A Survey of the Rock Art in the Natal Drakensberg’ Project (1978-1981)
→ San rock art exhibition at the National Museum & Research Center of Altamira
→ Interview with Dr Ben Smith
→ African Rock Art Archive
 
→ Bradshaw Foundation
→ Rock Art Network