Ebook: Cattle Theft in Christol Cave. A Critical History of a Rock Image in South Africa

“The first admirable contribution of this book is the quite masterful reconstruction of events that led from the discovery of this panel in the late nineteenth century to the condition in which we find it today. I venture to say only French rock art specialists could have done this. There is not as pronounced a tradition of dealing so minutely with the detail at individual sites among South African rock art specialists. […] Not only, though, do Le Quellec and colleagues reconstruct the history of research, but they also construct a sequence of paintings to account for the array of different images on this rather amazing panel. The set of apparently colonial as well as precolonial subjects forms an important component of their main argument, which is not about the merits of removing images and transporting them to colonial museums, but about the subtle layers of preconceived beliefs and preoccupations that frame interpretations of apparently obvious content.” (John Parkington, African Archaeological Review 29: 473-475).