Dorothea's interest in rock art scholarship continued after the successful publication of the first batch of Stow's reproductions. She was on a mission to prove that the bushmen were the original inhabitants of southern Africa, and to dispute suggestions that all of Africa's cultural output was derived from an exotic and superior civilisation that had peopled the continent in ancient times. The presence of rock art throughout the country was proof of the earlier widespread existence of bushmen across the land and Dorothea was determined to document the painted record they had left behind. It was time to investigate the rock art in an area she felt had yet to receive the attention of researchers and copyists.

In the wider world, global politics and financial woes had exerted their influence on intellectual life in cities far from the metropolitan centres of Europe and North America. As Dorothea explained to Käthe Woldmann, the depressed economic climate of the 1930s had put an end to the possibility of state money being available for research – even in Cape Town. But Dorothea was not deterred in her aim to document rock art located in the hitherto overlooked swathe of country stretching from Piquetberg (now Piketberg) in the west of the Cape Province, through Paarl, Ceres, Worcester, Swellendam and Riversdale, to the mountains around Oudtshoorn, George and Uniondale. Her interest extended to the Bedford, Albany and Graaff Reinet districts. Stow and Bleek's Rock Paintings in South Africa (1930), and Tongue and Bleek's Bushman Paintings (1909), had covered rock art in the foothills of the Drakensberg in the eastern Cape, Basutoland (now Lesotho), the Orange Free State (now Free State) and Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal). The project that Dorothea set in motion in her chosen research zone offers an opportunity to examine the social and affective networks that characterise fieldwork, to probe the gap between private and public texts, and to investigate the emotional and interactive processes that underlie the making of knowledge in the field.