ABSTRACT
Miles Burkitt, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, was the first trained archaeologist to outline rock art regions in southern Africa. Rock art regions no longer need be defined in terms of subjectively defined aesthetic styles or schools: especially in South Africa, no suitable stylistic criteria to delineate regions have been suggested since the 1970s in any case. Although rock art images in the adjacent Kruger National Park were first recorded in the 1980s, little was known about sites in the immediate environs of Bonganior, for that matter, in Mpumalanga Province as a whole until the stalwart work of ranger Conraad de Rosner and his colleagues. Fortunately, Bongani rock art and its study do not seem to have suffered the same fate, but there has been no long-term monitoring. All the images in the 49 sample sites appear to belong to the hunter-gatherer painted tradition, although a few open sites with agriculturist engravings are recorded in the broader region.
