ABSTRACT
It is in an attempt to make sense of the rock paintings and engravings of the San of South Africa that David Lewis-Williams, then Professor of Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand, adumbrated a theory of religion that accounts for its origin and nature (though not the particularities of content) in wholly neuropsychological terms. Presented rst in his Believing and seeing (1981), the theory has been elaborated in successive works in collaboration with several other scholars: especially with Thomas A. Dowson (a colleague in the Rock Art Research Institute in the University of Witwatersrand) in ‘The signs of all times: entoptic phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic art’ (1988); Jean Clottes (a scholar of prehistoric rock art in France) in their book on The shamans of prehistory (1998 [1996]); and David Pearce (a researcher in the Rock Art Institute), in their co-authored Inside the Neolithic mind (2005).
