ABSTRACT
The author has been involved as part of the project team of Wildebeest Kuil from its inception.
The Wildebeest Kuil Rock Art Centre has as its principal feature a low hill over which are spread a few hundred Later Stone Age rock engravings. The site entered the colonial archive in the 1870s by way of rock art copies and discussion by geologist George Stow (1905) who ventured there after establishment of the diamond-mining town of Kimberley. Engravings from Wildebeest Kuil were subsequently sent to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London, and two ended up in the collection of the British Museum (Fock, 1965). In later years, the site’s proximity to Kimberley made it a regular place of interest for prehistorians passing through town — amongst them, Miles Burkitt (1928), the Abbé Breuil, and Desmond Clark (1959).
