Tsodilo(boswana1)

Brief Description

With one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world, Tsodilo has been called the ''Louvre of the Desert''. Over 4,500 paintings are preserved in an area of only 10 km2 of the Kalahari Desert. The archaeological record of the area gives a chronological account of human activities and environmental changes over at least 100,000 years. Local communities in this hostile environment respect Tsodilo as a place of worship frequented by ancestral spirits.

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TSODILO, BOTSWANA. THE MOUNTAIN OF THE GODS, IN SAN BUSHMAN CULTURE. THE LOCAL iKHUNG CALL IT "THE BRACELET OF GOD". A ROCKY OUTCROP OF MOUNTAINS, IN THE VAST PLAINS OF N WEST BOTSWANA, WITH OVER 4500 PAINTINGS IN REDS AND WHITES OF ANIMALS, HUMANS AND TRANCE DANCE SCENES, WITH THE ELAND AS THE RAIN ANIMAL, AND STRONGLY FEATIRED. TSODILO IS STILL AN IMPORTANT SPIRITUAL SITE FOR LOCAL SAN PEOPLES. FEMALE HILL TOWERS ABOVE THE VAST PLAIN. © © OUR PLACE THE WORLD HERITAGE COLLECTION 

Statement of Significance

Criterion i: For many thousands of years the rocky outcrops of Tsodilo in the harsh landscape of the Kalahari Desert have been visited and settled by humans, who have left rich traces of their presence in the form of outstanding rock art.
Criterion iii: Tsodilo is a site that has witnessed visits and settlement by successive human communities for many millennia.
Criterion vi: The Tsodilo outcrops have immense symbolic and religious significance for the human communities who continue to survive in this hostile environment.

Long Description

For many thousands of years the rocky outcrops of Tsodilo in the harsh landscape of the Kalahari Desert have been visited and settled by humans, who have left rich traces of their presence in the form of outstanding rock art. The outcrops have immense symbolic and religious significance for the human communities who continued to survive in this hostile environment.
Tsodilo is situated in the north-western corner of Botswana near the Namibian Border. Its massive quartzite rock formations rise from ancient sand dunes to the east and a dry fossil lake bed to the west. They are prominent isolated residual small mountains surrounded by an extensive lowland erosion surface in a hot dry region, known as inselbergs. Their height, shape and spatial relationship have given rise to a distinctive name for each: Male, Female, Child, Grandchild.
Caves and shelters are one of the main resources of the rock outcrop from the human point of view. Where excavated, they show a long sequence of occupation beginning in some cases as early as 100,000 years ago. They indicate repeated use thereafter, the artefact densities appearing to reflect visits, perhaps seasonal, by small mobile group of people. Divuyu and Nqoma are two excavated settlements of particular significance in the 1st millennium AD. Divuyu lies in a saddle at the top of Female; Nqoma is on plateaux below. A general pattern of public housing and living space, flanked by communal middens and perhaps burial areas, seemed to be the settlement plan, suggesting similarities with the spatial patterning of villages of central Africa.
The rock-art paintings are executed in red ochre derived from hematite occurring in the local rock. Much of the red art is naturalistic in subject and schematic in style, characterized by a variety of geometric symbols, distinctive treatment of the human figure, and exaggerated body proportions of many animals. In terms of style and content the art has much in common with paintings of similar antiquity in Zambia and Angola rather than neighbouring Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. A distinctive series of white paintings occurs at only twelve sites: animals in white are rarer and include more domestic species than the reds. Human figures are common, as are geometric designs.
The art is not well dated, although some of it could be more than 2,000 years old. Pictures with cattle are regarded as 600-1200, following the introduction of cattle to Tsodilo after the 6th century AD; geometric art is generally regarded as about 1,000 years old. The latest paintings date to the 19th century on oral evidence. Some white paintings appear to be riders on horses, unknown until the 1850s.
Cup- and canoe-shaped hollows in rock, a common phenomenon throughout the continent, are particularly numerous at Tsodilo. One group, interpreted as a trail of animal footprints, is spread over several hundred metres and is one of the largest rock pictures in the world. These hollows may have been made in the late Stone Age, about 2,000 years ago.
The extent and intensity of mining activity on the mountains to recover ochre, specularite and green stone, used for decorative purposes, is impressive. The mines are clearly pre-colonial.
Source: UNESCO/CLT/WHC

Historical Description

Present evidence indicates the earliest occupants at Tsodilo probably in the Middle Stone Age, perhaps around 100,000 years ago or earlier. A Late Stone Age cultural presence is dated around 70,000 years ago. In general, repeated use over an extensive period of time appears to reflect small mobile groups of people camping briefly, perhaps on seasonal visits, for example when the fruit of the mongongo tree, Ricinodendron rautanenii, ripens. Local quartz as well as exotic stone were used for tool-making in both the Middle and Late Stone Ages. The use of non-local raw material suggests that contact and some form of exchange have existed at Tsodilo for tens of thousands of years. The Middle Stone Age is marked by the appearance of large stone blades. Tsodilo is unique in demonstrating an extensive record of freshwater fish exploitation in a now arid landscape where rivers formerly flowed. Barbed bone points were probably used to tip fish-spears; bone toolmaking at Tsodilo may well go back 40,000 years.
Fishbone and stone artefacts decrease in the Late Stone Age (c 30,000 BP). The appearance of ostrich eggs in archaeological deposits around that time indicates the development of a new strategy for acquiring a new resource for food and artefact-making. In particular, a tradition of making beads of ostrich egg-shell began then and continues today. Until as recently as c AD 600, the people of Tsodilo lived entirely by hunting, fishing, and foraging for wild food.
By the 7th century AD, however, the pace of change in technology, subsistence, and settlement organization increased as iron and copper metallurgy were introduced. This phase is also marked by the introduction of cattle. Interaction between Late Stone Age foragers and Early Iron Age agro-pastoralists occurred. Settlement took the form of apparently unique social structures. Divuyu itself is the richest site yet discovered in southern Africa for this period. Copper and iron beads, bracelets, and other ornaments became common. All the metal was imported - the copper probably from southern Zaire or north-eastern South Africa, the iron perhaps from only 40km distant - and worked locally. Nqoma at the end of the 1st millennium has the richest variety of metal jewellery of any known contemporary site in southern Africa.
The same two sites in particular, Divuyu and Nqoma, have indicated domestic herding and a settled lifestyle as early as the 7th-8th centuries AD from evidence of middens and house foundations. Cultivated crops such as sorghum and millet were added to the diet. Sheep and goats augmented the few domestic cattle kept by earlier foraging communities. Pottery was produced for a range of domestic purposes and personal adornment became common and often elaborate. Mining for specularite was extensive in 800-1000, and continued into the 19th century. The output was enormous, doubtless contributing to the amount of jewellery and cattle owned by the Nqoma people. The rich elements of Tsodilo Iron Age culture continued well into the 13th century when Nqoma declined, possibly because of drought or war. No further durable exotic objects seem to have entered the Tsodilo region until the effects of the European Atlantic trade began to be felt in the 18th century. Tsodilo became part of the Portuguese Congo-Angola trade axis.
Historically, the Tsodilo area was occupied by the N/hae, who left in the mid-19th century. Its first appearance on a map was in 1857, as a result of information collected by Livingstone during his explorations in 1849-56. In the 1850s the earliest known horsemen, Griqua ivory hunters, passed through the region. The !Kung arrived in the area and made at least a few of the paintings, possibly some of those showing horsemen. The rock art was first sketched and brought to Western attention in 1907 by Siegfried Passarge, a German geologist.
The two, present-day local communities, Hambukushu and !Kung, arrived as recently as c 1860. Nevertheless, they both have creation myths associated with Tsodilo, and they both have strong traditional beliefs that involve respect for Tsodilo as a place of worship and ancestral spirits. The spirituality of the place has become best known to non-local people through the writings of Laurens van der Post, notably The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958). Today, local churches and traditional doctors travel to Tsodilo for prayers, meditation, and medication. Most visitors arrive for religious reasons.
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