Mountain Meanings

Abstract

Mountains are loci of deep spiritual significance, where human societies negotiate both physical and metaphysical realms. In southern Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg, this significance is expressed through a dual record: a world-famous corpus of rock art and a dense concentration of excavated archaeological sites. For decades, rock art research in the Maloti-Drakensberg was dominated by the so-called shamanistic hypothesis, a model derived from San cosmology that transformed global understandings of ancient ritual and religion. Paradoxically, the ‘goodness of fit’ between the hypothesis and the region’s rock art record proved so compelling that it inadvertently stalled further research progress there. Drawing inspiration from the ontological turn, archaeologists over the past decade have been moving beyond shamanism—and the near-exclusive focus on rock art itself—in their investigations of past socioreligiosity in these mountains. New studies view the Maloti-Drakensberg as a socially and spiritually charged vertical landscape where potency was concentrated at altitude and navigation hinged on negotiation with nonhuman beings. This chapter reviews these trends and highlights three studies that explore mountain socioreligiosity at the scales of the assemblage, the site, and the landscape.