Rock Art Research Institute &
The Bradshaw Foundation

For three months, from March to May 2000 Dr Patricia Vinnicombe joined the Rock Art Research Institute as a visiting Research Fellow. Now retired, she has had time to unearth the polythene tracings of rock paintings she made in the Southern Drakensberg and Eastern Lesotho some forty years ago. Only a small proportion of these had been transferred to paper, and of these, only a selection appeared in her 1976 book, People of the Eland. The large majority were therefore not accessible, either for viewing or research.

With funding from the Bradshaw Foundation, two post-graduate students were employed to work on the task of cataloguing and then transferring selected polythene records to permanent paper, either in full colour or black and white. As a team, over 700 polythene sheets were catalogued and of these over one hundred have thus far been copied onto paper.

This painting was one of two eland antelope (above left), almost life size, is located in the Mount Currie District. A black and white reproduction of one of the two eland was included in the book People of the Eland (1976, Fig 71, 127). This is the original polythene tracing (above right), made by Patricia Vinnicombe (extreme right) of one of the two giant eland. It is held up by two graduate-students, Justine Olofsson (left) and Gilraen Laue (right), and will be transferred shortly onto permanent paper.

To the right, a colour rendering of an intricate group of paintings from Alicedale showing meandering dotted lines, which probably represent a conduit of power. The lines entwine eland antelope with human figures, some of them with animal heads.

RARI & Bradshaw Foundation Page [1] [2]