Guest Editorial

Abstract

Three papers in this CMAS issue focus on the management of southern African rock art sites. This is not by coincidence. They proceed from discussions held during a special ‘rock art heritage and management’ session (organised by Mélanie Duval and Stéphane Hœrlé) of the 23rd biennial meeting of the Society of the Africanist Archaeologist (Toulouse, France, 2016). The aim of this session was to examine to what extent and for which stakeholders rock art sites are a ‘cultural heritage’, beyond different challenges of preservation, promotion, and appropriation. Although presented papers covered the entire continent1 a large majority focused on Southern Africa where research on this subject seems encouraged by a conjunction of available means and acute issues related to the plurality of uses: domestic (pens), spiritual (ritual to ancestors), medicinal (use of pigments for medicines), tourist (development of open-air sites). This is exemplified by the papers gathered in this issue. Papers by Paul Hubbard and Mélanie Duval et al. were originally presented and discussed during the 2016 SAfA meeting. The paper by Ancila Nhamo is an original contribution submitted while this special issue was being put together. It was included because it offers another viewpoint on the situation in Zimbabwe and deepens our understanding of what is at stake for rock art site management. Although these papers base their discussion on Zimbabwean and South African experiences, many countries face similar challenges, albeit under different circumstances. These three papers, therefore, inform on general issues in rock art management and conservation for all countries with open-air rock art. Witness throughout all times, present all over the world, rock art sites are involved in complex heritage-making processes joining a large range of environmental (Darvill and Fernandes 2014) and human factors (Jopela 2011). In Africa rock art is mostly found in easily accessible open-air sites and these human factors are often linked with a variety of uses: domestic, spiritual, medicinal and/ or tourist. These factors are made more complex by polymorphic cultural and identity stakes (Duval 2012), as rock art sites are linked with the history of the peopling and the evolution of the activities and land uses (Pleurdeau et al. 2012), today mobilised by various stakeholders in post-colonial contexts (Hampson 2013; Ndlovu 2011). All in all, because they have permeated people’s natural, cultural and mental landscapes for such a long time, rock art sites not only raise the usual issues related to heritage-making process but also shed a revealing light on the relationships between stakeholders, space and time (Harvey 2001). The analysis of heritage-making process, i.e. the process through which a ‘spatial object’ becomes an ‘heritage object’ which social groups want to preserve through time, is directly connected to issues such as the interplay of participants at different levels (Ndoro and Pwiti 2001), local community involvement (Sullivan 2004), tourism management (Duval, Gauchon, and Smith 2017) and contents of promotion discourse (Mazel 2008), among others. In an applied prospect, one of the stakes is to define evolutionary balances between the various actors, in order to reconcile the diverse manners to perceive why and how an archaeological site makes sense (Waterton 2005). In their papers Ancila Nhamo and Paul Hubbard investigate the stakes of rock art management in the Zimbabwean context. While Ancila Nhamo proposes a global approach to rock art preservation issues in the country, Paul Hubbard digs into the history of rock art management in the Matobo Hills.