Painted Stories. A Guide to the Rock Art of AiAiba (Anibib Farm), Erongo Mountains, Namibia, by Peter Breunig

Painted Stories. A Guide to the Rock Art of AiAiba (Anibib Farm), Erongo Mountains, Namibia, by Peter Breunig. Namibia Scientific Society - Kuiseb Publishers. Windhoek, Namibia 2023. ISBN 9789994576845 / ISBN 978-99945-76-84-5

Painted Stories. A Guide to the Rock Art of AiAiba (Anibib Farm), Erongo Mountains, Namibia, by Peter Breunig in collaboration with Dr. Gabriele Franke.

Peter Breunig  

Introduction

In the northwestern part of Namibia's Erongo region, the Anibib Farm runs a guest house called AiAiba. The name AiAiba is better known than Anibib and will be used in this book for the whole area of the Anibib farm. The guest house has also another name: the Rock Painting Lodge. This sobriquet could not be more appropriate since the lodge is in one of the richest rock art areas of Namibia. This book examines those rock paintings, using them as example of the prehistoric treasure trove which can tell us about the world view of Namibia's ancient hunter-gatherers. Rock art is either painted or engraved. The difference is self-explanatory: Rock paintings are created by applying pigment to the rock, while rock carvings - also known as petroglyphs - are produced by various techniques of working the rock surface such as scratching, pecking, chiseling, or abrading. Most rock paintings depict people and/or animals, whereas the engravings show animals, tracks, and non-figurative shapes but few people. In Namibia, rock art is nothing unusual and can be found everywhere in the country, from the north to the south. To date, archaeologists have found and recorded, either as copies or as photographs, over 80,000 paintings and carvings in Namibia. Most of these occur in Damaraland, where the Brandberg alone accounts for over 45,000 examples of rock paintings. 50 km further north lie the Mik Mountains, with the UNESCO World Heritage Site Twyfelfontein on their eastern edge. Twyfelfontein is considered the highlight of southern African rock engraving sites, and together with the Mik Mountains the area is home to 13,000 known pieces of rock art, most of them petroglyphs. Indeed, almost three quarters of all of Namibia's known rock art come from these two areas in Damaraland. The Erongo Mountains make up another significant proportion of finds. We know this because of the work of researchers such as Henri Breuil. Breuil was a renowned prehistorian studying Ice Age cave paintings in his home country France. In the mid-20th century, he visited Namibia and studied rock art which had been discovered during the early colonial period of Namibia's history. During this time, he also visited the Erongo Mountains and Anibib. AiAiba did not exist then, but farmers showed him 18 rock art sites that they themselves had discovered. These contained exclusively rock paintings; carvings remain rare in the Erongo region to this day. Breuil, using the then usual technique of tracing the outlines of the paintings and then hand-coloring them with watercolors, documented all rock paintings he encountered. He published his findings in a book (Breuil I960), which illustrates precisely what he saw, or at least what he considered worth recording. He also visited other rock art sites in the Erongo such as the neighboring Omandumba Farm. On AiAiba, he documented 344 paintings. Several years later, the same region was visited by Ernst-Rudolf Scherz. Scherz had been Breuil's assistant and made it his mission to document all of Namibia's rock art. He too published a book detailing his finds in Anibib (Scherz 1986), documenting the same sites as Breuil and thus the same paintings. Today, the numbers look very different. Using modern methods of documentation which will be discussed later, Breuil's sites alone yield 677 paintings - almost twice as many as Breuil recorded. [...]

This is an excerpt from Painted Stories. A Guide to the Rock Art of AiAiba (Anibib Farm), Erongo Mountains, Namibia, by Peter Breunig.

Title: Painted Stories
Subtitle: A Guide to the Rock Art of AiAiba (Anibib Farm), Erongo Mountains, Namibia
Authors: Peter Breunig; Gabriele Franke
Publisher: Namibia Scientific Society - Kuiseb Publishers
Windhoek, Namibia 2023
ISBN 9789994576845 / ISBN 978-99945-76-84-5
Softcover, 17 x 24 cm, 228 pages, throughout colour photographs, several in large format