INTRODUCTION

Wildebeest Kuil, which was known historically as the Halfway House Kopje, is a rock engraving site on the outskirts of Kimberley, one of many in this region of the Northern Cape in South Africa (Figs 17.1. and 17.2.). In 1933, the then doyenne of South African rock engravings research, Maria Wilman, referred to the 19th-century removal of about eight engravings from the site, and dismissed those that remained on the hill as being “not of great importance” (Wilman 1933: 5). Today, as a public rock art site with visitor centre (Morris 2003; Morris and colleagues 2009) and a place where San people construct aspects of their contemporary identity (Weiss 2005, 2007), Wildebeest Kuil might be judged quite differently. ‘Importance’, after all, is entirely relative: to whom and by what criteria?

This chapter is about the multivocality of a place and about the different understandings – assessments of ‘importance’ – that have been expressed around it. It concerns the diversity of perspectives, histories and contemporary interests that converge there. More particularly in the present, it is about how such multiple perspectives or voices might be harnessed (or silenced) when a place like this becomes a public rock art site, and one through which people and communities – including those who are most marginalised – express aspects of their identity. I write as an archaeologist concerned with such questions as “what is heritage good for?” (Turner 2006); and with promoting socially responsible research about a past made accessible to all (Mitchell 2002: 427-428).

The colonial era recognition of rock art here dates from the early 1870s and within a nascent archaeological interest in the precolonial past. Not surprisingly, interpretations, reviewed below, have changed and influenced perceptions of value within the developing frameworks of scholarly discourse. An early empiricist preoccupation with style and sequence, and the aesthetic qualities of rock art, gives way to work emphasising meaning in the engravings and the site – their social and political embeddedness in the past, and in the present. New senses of significance have arisen today.