Rock Art Research

Bows in hunter-gatherer societies are not mono-functional items. Besides hunting and fighting, they may also have been used for musical purposes. Rock art in southern Africa provides a record of this use, giving way to investigating past music cultures. This paper brings together the published depictions of musical bows from across southern Africa with some new discoveries. Although depictions of bows being played as musical instruments have been recorded for decades, these scenes still lack archaeological or musicological investigation. When analysing these depictions, it turns out that there is a comparatively wide variety of technical aspects of sound production, of ways of playing and of contexts of the musical performance, indicating rich cultural diversity among the early peoples of the subcontinent. Moreover, the paintings show details in these aspects that are not corroborated by ethnographic studies. Nevertheless, they open up a tableau of the potential context variability in the musical practice of pre-History and also indicate that rock art studies should be open to finding contexts of meaning beyond the dichotomy of the purely ritual and the profane.