Dead ahead: movement as metaphor in a painted panel at Phokojoeng, Lesotho

Inspired by the insights of David Lewis-Williams, rock art research has changed significantly over the past half-century. As he has shown, interpretations of hunter-gatherer rock paintings and engravings in southern Africa depend inextricably on working back and forth between the surviving imagery and its location, on the one hand, and insights from (principally San) ethnographic data on the other. This paradigm, often dubbed ‘shamanistic’, has generated a rich and ever-growing body of research, but most interpretations have focused on specific images or themes. In comparison, studies of the full corpus of imagery as a relational whole at the level of the individual site remain uncommon. Taking advantage of the discrete nature, limited number, and, we argue, likely contemporaneity of the paintings at one site (Phokojoeng) in highland Lesotho, we do precisely that. Combining knowledge of metaphors denoting animal control, out-of-body travel, and death in altered states of consciousness with the spatial positioning of the images depicted delivers a detailed understanding of Phokojoeng’s art, one focused on the experiences of shamans as they moved from this world into that of the spirits.