Southern Africa's first known stenciled rock art found hiding in plain sight

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Southern Africa has one of the most detailed and elaborate bodies of rock art anywhere in the world, from herds of running antelope to dancing men and humanoid beings with wings, hooves and horns. All are painted with fine brushstrokes or fingers.

One thing this art lacks is stencils. Now, a new study has identified the first-ever stenciled rock art in all of southern Africa. What makes it doubly unusual is that it was made from a template rather than an existing object, which is rare even on a global scale.

"I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at for a while," said David Pearce, a rock art researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand. "Then they popped into focus, a bit like optical illusions do." The study, by Pearce and Cambridge archaeologist Kiah Johnson, is published in the South African Archaeological Bulletin. Pearce and Johnson discovered the stencils in the La Rochelle rock shelter in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, the study reported.

The surrounding highlands are dotted with steep cliffs and shallow shelters, scarcely any of which have paintings. Those that do are often faded, centuries of sun, wind and rain washing away any paint that may once have clung to the rocky surfaces. La Rochelle is different.

"The shelter itself is fairly large, particularly for the region. It's very unusual in that the floor is concreted in," said Pearce. "It has a set of wooden pews and a makeshift pulpit and is occasionally used for church services.

So [it is] fairly unusual as rock shelters go." According to the study, paintings of hartebeest, eland and humanoid beings are scattered throughout the shelter, many in the typical fine-line brush-painted style associated with hunter-gatherers. Anna Steyn first recorded the shelter in 1995, and Mdudusi Maseko re-recorded it in 2020. But even after decades of research, an unusual splatter of paint had been overlooked, the study authors wrote.