Wildebeest Kuil Rock Art Centre is a rock engraving site with visitor centre on land owned by the !Xun and Khwe San situated about 16 km from Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa.Morris, D. & Beaumont, P. 2004. Archaeology in the Northern Cape: some key sites. Kimberley: McGregor Museum; Parkington, J. Morris, D. & Rusch, N. 2008. Karoo rock engravings. Clanwilliam: Krakadouw Trust It is a declared Provincial Heritage Site managed by the Northern Cape Rock Art Trust in association with the McGregor Museum. The engravings exemplify one of the forms often referred to as ‘Bushman rock art' – or Khoe-San rock art – with the rock paintings of the Drakensberg, Cederberg and other regions of South Africa being generally better known occurrences. Differing in technique, the engravings have many features in common with rock paintings. A greater emphasis on large mammals such as elephant, rhino and hippo, in addition to eland, and an often reduced concern with depicting the human form set the engravings apart from the paintings of the sub-continent.

Rock Art and Other Archaeological Traces

Background South Africa's rich heritage of rock art occurs in the form of engravings on the interior plains, and paintings in the more mountainous areas, their distributions overlapping in places. Different hunter-gatherer, herder, agriculturist and colonial rock art traditions have been discerned;Maggs, T.M.O'C. 1995. Neglected rock art: the rock engravings of agriculturist communities in South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 50:132-142; Ouzman, S. 1999. 'Koeka Ka Kie, hents op bokkor of ik schiet!’ Introducing the rock art of the South African Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. The Digging Stick 16(3):1-15; Smith, B. W., & Ouzman, S. 2004. Taking stock: identifying Khoekhoen Herder rock art in southern Africa. Current Anthropology 45: 499-526. while some variability may reflect a dynamic interplay of history and landscape which is not easily resolved in purely ethnic, culture and/or techno-economic terms.Manhire, A. 1998. The role of hand prints in the rock art of the south western Cape. South African Archaeological Bulletin 53: 98-108; Morris, D. 2002. Driekopseiland and 'the rain's magic power': history and landscape in a new interpretation of a Northern Cape rock engraving site. Unpublished Masters dissertation. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape.

The region bounded by the Vaal and Orange Rivers has a particularly concentrated distribution of engraving sites, of which Wildebeest Kuil (situated between Kimberley and Barkly West) is one.Fock, G.J. & Fock, D.M.L. 1989. Felsbilder in Südafrika. Teil 3 (Vaal-Oranje-Becken). Köln: Böhlau Verlag.

Rock art records The earliest records of rock engravings at Wildebeest Kuil are the copies made by George William Stow who was on the Diamond Fields in the early 1870s. In 1875, Stow sent copies of paintings and engravings, including those made here, to Dr Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town: "their publication", wrote Bleek, "cannot but effect a radical change in the ideas generally entertained with regard to Bushmen and their mental condition."Bleek, W.H.I. 1875. Bushmen researches. Part 1 & 2. Cape Monthly Magazine 11, 104-115 & 150-155. Several of the engravings copied by Stow are still to be seen on site, but others were removed towards the end of the nineteenth century. Some of these were exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886, and at least two rock engravings are preserved in the collection of the British Museum.British Museum Collection It was Stow's copy that, in the 1960s, enabled positive identification of its origin.Fock, G.J. 1965.Man 65:194-195

The first systematic work on rock art in the region was the survey published by Maria Wilman.Wilman, M. 1933. The rock engravings of Griqualand West and Bechuanaland, South Africa. Cambridge: Deighton Bell. Gerhard and Dora Fock followed up Wilman's work in the 1960s-1970s, documenting in detail the engravings at the major sites of Bushman's Fountain,Fock, G.J. 1979. Felsbilder in Südafrika. Teil 1 (Klipfontein). Köln: Böhlau Verlag. KinderdamFock, G.J. & Fock, D.M.L. 1984. Felsbilder in Südafrika. Teil 2 (Kinderdam und Kalahari). Köln: Böhlau Verlag. and Driekops Eiland,Fock, G.J. & Fock, D.M.L. 1989. Felsbilder in Südafrika. Teil 3 (Vaal-Oranje-Becken). Köln: Böhlau Verlag. and at several hundred other locales in the Northern Cape and adjoining districts.

When G. and D. Fock documented Wildebeest Kuil in 1968, they recorded 178 individual engravings. Detailed plotting has since revealed hundreds more (including all human-made marks).

Engraving technique Most of the engravings in the Kimberley area are made with the 'pecked' technique: a hard stone was used to chip away the outer crust of the rock, exposing the lighter coloured rock beneath. Sites north west of Kimberley are often on andesite outcrops (as at Wildebeest Kuil and Driekopseiland) while to the south, in Karoo geological settings, the koppies are mostly dolerite. With time, the exposed portions of the older engravings have become as dark as the outer crust through the build-up of patina.Morris, D. 2004. Wildebeest Kuil. In D. Morris, & Beaumont, P. (ed). Archaeology in the Northern Cape: some key sites. Kimberley: McGregor Museum.

Silvia Tomášková has carried out exploratory work at Wildebeest Kuil, approaching the engravings as instances of 'purposefully modified stone' that offer opportunities to think about skills and materials in a context of embodied practice carried out by individuals in a larger social context.Tomášková, Silvia 2015. Digital technologies in context: Prehistoric engravings in the Northern Cape, South Africa. Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 2:222-232.

The age of the engravings The pecked engravings of the area are estimated to span a period from perhaps a few hundred to possibly several thousand years ago.Morris, D. 1988. Engraved in place and time: a review of variability in the rock art of the Northern Cape and Karoo. South African Archaeological Bulletin 43:109-121; Beaumont, P.B. & Vogel, J.C. 1989. Patterns in the age and context of rock art in the Northern Cape. South African Archaeological Bulletin 44, 73-81. Direct cation ratio dating methods applied at Klipfontein,Whitley, D.S. & Annegarn, H.J. 1994. Cation-ratio dating of rock engravings from Klipfontein, Northern Cape. In Dowson, T.A. & Lewis-Williams, J.D. (eds) Contested images: diversity in southern African rock art research:189-197. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. giving estimates spanning the entire Holocene, hinge, however, on a calibration curve of uncertain reliability, and the samples were too small to run more than one assay each.Morris, D. 2002. Driekopseiland and "the rain’s magic power": history and landscape in a new interpretation of a Northern Cape rock engraving site. Masters dissertation, University of the Western Cape; Whitley, D.S. & Annegarn, H.J. 1994. Cation-ratio dating of rock engravings from Klipfontein, Northern Cape. In Dowson, T.A. & Lewis-Williams, J.D. (eds) Contested images: diversity in southern African rock art research:189-197. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Hairline engravings, known from a few sites in this area and more commonly in the Karoo, are consistently beneath pecked engravings in superimposed sequences, and are thus older. Butzer used geomorphological evidence to infer bracketing ages for the engravings at Bushmans Fountain and Driekopseiland,Butzer, K .W., Fock, G.J., Scott, L. & Stuckenrath, R. 1979. Dating and context of rock engravings in Southern Africa. Science 203:1201-1214. with the resulting scenario being in broad accord with more recent work on palaeoenvironmental change at a regional scale, as well as with findings at other sites, and observations of associated archaeological material.Morris, D. 2002. Driekopseiland and "the rain’s magic power": history and landscape in a new interpretation of a Northern Cape rock engraving site. Masters dissertation, University of the Western Cape. At Wildebeest Kuil some of the engravings were undoubtedly made by Later Stone Age occupants of the site 1200–1800 years ago, as suggested by the radiocarbon readings cited below.

Interpreting the engravings Given a shamanistic understanding of the art, the Wildebeest Kuil engravings may well relate to beliefs about the rain and rain-making. Medicine people or shamans could access the spirit world through altered states of consciousness and harness supernatural power to heal the sick, control animals, and make rain. It is possible that many of the engravings were inspired by visions experienced in altered states of consciousness, and depicted on the rocks so that others could share and draw inspiration from them.Lewis-Williams, J.D., Dowson, T.A. & Deacon, J. 1993. Rock art and changing perceptions of southern Africa’s past: Ezeljagdspoort reviewed. Antiquity 67:273-291. It also appears that places selected for making engravings were chosen for their significance in relation to these beliefs.Deacon, J. 1988. The power of a place in understanding southern San rock engravings. World Archaeology 20:129-140; Morris, D. 2002. Driekopseiland and "the rain’s magic power": history and landscape in a new interpretation of a Northern Cape rock engraving site. Masters dissertation, University of the Western Cape.

Stone circles and stone artefacts Stone circles and clearings, containing Later Stone Age occupation or activity debris, on and around the hill were noted by Stow in the 1870s.Stow, G. W. 1905. The native races of South Africa. London: Swan, Sonnenschein. Cf. Clark, J.D. 1959. The prehistory of Southern Africa. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. One, near the crest of the hill, was excavated in 1983 by Beaumont,Beaumont, P.B. & Vogel, J.C. 1989. Patterns in the age and context of rock art in the Northern Cape. South African Archaeological Bulletin 44, 73-81. yielding two Later Stone Age aggregates – a Wilton assemblage overlain by Ceramic Later Stone Age, with associated radiocarbon readings of 1790±60 BP and 1230±80 BP.

J.H. Power had picked up here a pressure-flaked tanged and barbed stone arrowheadClark, J.D. 1959. The prehistory of Southern Africa. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. – this being an example of distinctive artefacts which occur as unusual "trace objects" at a number of post-2000 BP sites from Lesotho into the western interior,Van Riet Lowe, C. 1947. More Neolithic elements from South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 2, 91-96; Humphreys, A.J.B. 1991. On the distribution and dating of bifacial tanged and barbed arrowheads in the interior of South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 46, 41-43; Mitchell, P. 1996. Marine shells and ostrich eggshell as indicators of prehistoric exchange and interaction in the Lesotho Highlands. African Archaeological Review 13:35-76. which have been interpreted as stone skeuomorphs of iron originals.Mitchell, P. 2002. The archaeology of Southern Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge Africa Collection. p 294

Kousop’s residence A comment made to Louis Péringuey in 1909 by missionary Westphal refers to the last Khoe-San occupants of the site being “'Scheelkoos' and his family" – a rare reference to a named Khoe-San individual from the protocolonial frontier era in South Africa.Louis Péringuey Scheelkoos, also known as Kousop, led resistance to colonial settlement in the region, and was killed with 130 of his followers, in a counter-attack, on the banks of the nearby Vaal River in 1858.Schoeman, Karel. 1995. New Dictionary of South African Biography edited by E.J. Verwey Vol 1 Pretoria: HSRC Publishers. pp 110-112.

Colonial era sites