異域文化 How Art Made The World 人、藝術(shù)、世界 08

And when you say these are pictures of daily life, that just doesn't fit. And when I began to notice all these strange points about the paintings, I thought we've got to find some way of cracking the code of what these paintings are. But when Lewis Williams began his investigation, he immediately faced a problem. Because these are the San today. Rather than living in mountains, they now live a thousand miles away on the Kalahari grasslands of Namibia. Over the centuries, their ancestors were persecuted and driven from the Drakensberg. Although the San still hunt, today they no longer paint. And there is a good reason for that. For one thing, there are no rocks in the Kalahari for them to paint on and their ancient tradition has disappeared. The San artists have died out, taking their secrets with them, so the key to unlocking the mystery of these strange paintings in the mountains seemed to be lost forever. There just didn't seem to be any way of getting at that because the people who made the paintings were extinct. But then far away from the Drakensberg, Lewis Williams found the first clue. It was the start of a trail that would eventually lead him all the way back to the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe.

Although there are no Bushmen today who remember a time when their people painted on rock, there were some still alive at the end of the 19th century. And thankfully, the stories that they had to tell were written down and preserved. They are kept here at an archive in Cape Town. At the end of the 19th century, a German settler called Wilhelm Blake discovered there were still some San Bushmen alive who had lived around the Drakensberg. Blake realized that they opened a rare window onto the past. He began to interview them. This vast archive, 12, 000 documents, is their testimony. It gives a tantalizing glimpse of a culture that no longer exists.

Lewis Williams had a hunch that buried among these papers which were like a Bible of Bushmen belief, there might be clues as to the original significance of the Drakensberg images. There was indeed something there.

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word:

tantalizing:吸引人的