Animals have been represented in many cultures around the world in various forms such as in ceramics, stone tools, bone, in murals and as rock paintings in shelters and caves. A specific set of concepts and views of the world determine the choice of a particular colour and technique, and each of these features has a specific value and cultural significance.

Animals for many reasons, and depending on a specific time and place, have played important roles in the ways people express their beliefs and social concerns. Animal symbolism is linked to the way people categorise and order their world (Sperber 1996) and the study of such symbolism can take different perspectives. In southern African San rock art research, animals have been identified as metaphors that portray links with the spiritual world and trance rituals (Lewis-Williams 1981, 1998, 2002; Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989). The eland, the most important animal in San society, is a polysemic symbol that has relevance to various aspects of San society but which takes a specific reference, a focus polysemy, in the rock art, that is “on its potency and transformative power in the context of the dance and other shamanistic circumstances” (Lewis-Williams 2002: 71).

The emphasis of this paper, however, is to discuss how recent social and cultural analyses of the human body, known as ‘body theory’, have contributed specifically to the way we understand gender concerns and animal symbolism in the rock art research of south-central Africa.

Body concerns are especially related to the academic study of gender and this is not restricted only to feminism. Gender centres on the social construction of masculinity and femininity and the socialvalues invested in the sexual difference between women and men (Gilchrist 1991). Gender becomes then a dynamic cultural construction and as such it is culturally specific.

As Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector pointed out in 1984, there has been no systematic work in the archaeological study of gender, nor on field manuals advising on methods for examining gender in the archaeological record. Accordingly, we need to employ caution in how gender is constructed.