ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the research seminar held at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, in March 2000, and at the seminar held in honour of David Lewis-Williams in the Waterberg, South Africa, in April 2000. Ethnography can serve equally well to remind people of the distance existing between the material they study and themselves, urging them to reflect on the elements missing as much as on those present in the own material. The ethnography, while in fact not collected directly from San groups producing rock art, has provided a basis for developing sophisticated interpretive frameworks that have also supplied analogies for interpretations of Scandinavian and other European rock art. While viewpoints on hunting and magic originated in an academic belief in 'local ethnography', a study of ethno history reveals the inaccuracies of this approach. Even where a certain informed insight exists, a final and exhaustive explanation for the making and meaning of rock art is unlikely ever to be found.
