Environmental Futures Seminar - Camille Bourdier

Rock art research throughout the world has moved towards a holistic approach to address its essential issues: age and cultural attribution; meaning, social uses, image-making economy, and cultural significance; change and continuity in space and time, and related socio-cultural interactions. The main aim is to get a thorough understanding of the role rock art played in the cultural and social dynamics of the past but also at present days, as a living heritage for many communities. Such an approach requires consideration of not only the images themselves but also the different contexts in which they are inscribed to through an interdisciplinary investigation (archaeology, environmental sciences, ethnography, anthropology). This talk will discuss this topic through the example of research done on the Later Stone Age rock paintings at Pomongwe cave in the World Heritage Matopos Cultural Landscape (Zimbabwe).

Dr Camille Bourdier is an archaeologist, rock art specialist and senior lecturer at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in Toulouse (France). Her research considers rock art of past hunter-gatherer societies in France (Cussac Cave), and in Southern Africa (Zimbabwe) where she supervises an international interdisciplinary team on the Matopos World Heritage Cultural Landscape. She specifically addresses the issue of imagery change and continuity, and the cultural dynamics over time, as well as the social uses of image-making in these societies.