David Lewis-Williams

A foundation to Lewis-Williams's work has been the use of ethnography. As an undergraduate he was exposed to Isaac Schapera's The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (1930)[9] From the start of his professional career he drew on ethnography to address the meaning of San rock art. In 1968, he read philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd's Specimens of Bushman Folklore,[2] and later engaged with the manuscripts the archive of transcriptions of conversations with ǀXam-speaking San people from the 1870s.[2] Although he never met her, Bleek's daughter, Dorothea Bleek, held a position in social anthropology at UCT where the archival collection is housed .[14]

Other available ethnographic sources have been central in Lewis-Williams's work, particularly the accounts provided by Colonial administrator Joseph Orpen in an article published in 1874 about his conversations with a San guide named Qing,[15] the words spoken to Marion Walsham How by the southern Sotho man called Mapote,[16] and the Kalahari San ethnographies that developed from the work of the Marshall family and others during the 1950s and 1960s.[2]

The 'trance dance, as practised by the Ju/'hoansi in Botswana and Namibia in the twentieth century, has been at the centre of Lewis-Williams' arguments about shamanism and altered states of consciousness as the source of the images seen in southern African rock art. However, several researchers (including the artist Pippa Skotnes, the literary scholar Michael Wessels and the archaeologist Anne Solomon) dispute Lewis-Williams's interpretation of the important /Xam San ethnographic texts that describe dances and healing[17]

Shamanism, which derives from the Siberian Tungus word shaman, was used by Lewis-Williams to explain the metaphor of death that he alleges is common to both ethnography and San rock art.[2][18] The shamanic world often has tiered realms inhabited by spirits that can be accessed through altered states of consciousness (ASC). The world inhabited by people is supplemented by other realms that are usually conceptualised as existing above or below the inhabited world. Shamans have the ability to mediate between these other worlds. For the San, other realms were accessed during altered states of consciousness, and at rock faces where rock art can be found:

everything created on it was in some way itself associated with the spirit realm.[2]

More significantly, Lewis-Williams claims that the collection of San ethnography demonstrates the trance or healing dance, see San healing practices, is at the core of San belief,[2][19] Metaphors for death are supposedly contained in the trance dance. As San shamans dance, their supernatural power, or ‘potency’, builds up until it reaches a breaking point and flies out of the body. At this point, they ‘die’, a metaphor for travelling to another realm where spirits dwell in the same way as the soul travels after leaving after physical death.[2] However, there are methodological issues concerning the use of 20th century ethnographies, from peoples who did not make rock art, as analogous to interpret art elsewhere that is hundreds or even thousands of years older.

Lewis-Williams argues that the trance dance correlates with symbolism in the rock art. Features depicted in images that, it is argued, relate to altered states of consciousness, include nasal bleeding and the ‘arms back’ posture.[2][19] Lewis-Williams and Megan Biesele (known for her work with the Ju/'hoan people) showed that the gap between different groups of San and different traditions of rock art could be bridged because of similar terms and concepts centred around the dance used by both the /Xam San in the south and the Ju/'hoansi San people in the north.[20] Building on the work of previous scholars such as Lorna Marshall and Daniel McCall regarding a 'pan-San' belief system,[21] Biesele and Lewis-Williams together suggested that the conceptual linguistic terms and ritual observances similar to the Ju/'hoansi and |Xam could be used to understand the complexity of the images. Indeed, Lewis-Williams writes that

… there seemed to be no myth common to both corpora: the parallels lay deeper than surface narratives.[22]

The idea of a conceptual belief system was expanded upon using neuropsychology. Together with Thomas Dowson, Lewis-Williams explored the relationship between universal neuropsychological patterns in the wiring of the human brain and practices in shamanistic societies.[23] Using data produced from laboratory experiments with hallucinogens, they proposed a neuropsychological model with multiple stages of hallucinations experienced during altered states of consciousness. Simply put, the model demonstrates the relationship between altered states of consciousness and the subjective interpretation of hallucinations.

The premise of the neuropsychological model is that there is a difference between cultural imagery and neurologically produced visual patterns known as entoptic phenomena.[24] During ASCs, which can be induced in a number of ways, the first stage of hallucination experienced by a subject contains only entoptic phenomena, such as the scintillating scotoma experienced by migraine sufferers. The second stage begins when the hallucinations are construed by the subject into culturally familiar content. The implication of this is that entoptic phenomena will be understood differently in different cultures. The final stage is one of deep visual and somatic hallucinations, with multiple images and sensations understood in a cultural context.

Despite being able to explain why geometric and representational forms occur together in much hunter-gatherer art worldwide, and providing a 'universal' link through human neurology if cultural differences are allowed, the model has been criticised.[25] Critics have two concerns. First, the cross-cultural extrapolation of shamanism, and second, pushing this idea far into the past. In reply, Lewis-Williams holds to the neuropsychological model but emphasises that the idea of shamanism is not a simple analogy,[26] it requires contextual definition. Furthermore, there is a need to have the idea behind the neuropsychological model practically demonstrated in further examples than the rock art of the San, Coso people and Upper Palaeolithic used in The signs of all times: entoptic phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic art (1988).