Engraved Landscape Biesje Poort - Many Voices (Paperback)

Engraved Landscape Biesje Poort: Many Voices tell two stories. It provides a valuable record of important pre-historic and historic artefacts that would ordinarily be inaccessible to many South Africans. But more significantly it showcase new ways of doing research in a contested and fractured environment. Using a series of historic rock engravings as a springboard, the various contributors to the book- academics, communication experts, historians, architects, local Khomani residents- probe questions about the nature of heritage, about our differing cosmologies, and about our links to the land. These are inevitably subject to multiple interpretations and meanings, hence the multi-disciplinary team invited to participate in this important investigation of our heritage. – Melinda Silverman, department of architecture FADA, university of Johannesburg. Like most brilliant and eye-catching coffee table books, this compilation straddles the tantalisingly academic and the pop (ular) in anthropology. Its scholarly sections are well researched and tightly articulated. They retain this quality without being dry and overly pedagogical, hence are accessible to lay reader who wants to glean useful information. I foresee this book contributing to media anthropology, receiving critical appreciation. Descendants of the ‘First People’ participate as co-authors in the research- informants and people with their own experiential or ontological perspectives. As producers of new contemporary realities in a postcolonial South Africa, their voices include stories and myths surrounding the engravings, presented here in their own terms. As for the site, the research and informants are aware of the need to protect and preserve: the engravings that are the focus of the encounter are fragile. Research paradoxically may itself result in deterioration as people move over the rocks, but, here, awareness results in research actions and methods that try to ensure care and preservation. This is a heritage that requires informed interventions and use so that posterity may continue to enjoy the benefits of a valuable archaeological wealth. Dr Nhamo Mhiripiri, department of media & society studies, Midlands State university.