South Africa’s San rock art has long been admired for its elegance and mystery, but a new study suggests many of its most dynamic “dance scenes” may be far more specific than previously assumed. By systematically reviewing painted panels from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western Cape, researchers argue that the art preserves visual clues to trance dances, girls’ initiation ceremonies, and other communal rituals that once structured San life.
The key takeaway is that the paintings do not simply show people moving; they encode recognizable ritual elements - like clapping women, dancers in circles, and altered postures associated with trance - mirroring ethnographic descriptions of San healing and initiation practices, reports Archaeology Magazine.
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Mapping Dance Scenes Across South Africa
The research undertaken by Joshua Kumbani and Margarita Díaz-Andreu and recently published in TELESTES journal, draws on published descriptions of rock art panels and data from the South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA), comparing recurring motifs across four provinces: Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, and Western Cape. The aim was to move beyond passing mentions of “dancers” and instead classify dance imagery in a consistent, testable way.
One of the most striking outcomes is how dominant trance dance imagery appears to be in the sample, with KwaZulu-Natal showing the densest cluster of clear trance-related scenes. The authors note that these painted compositions often align with ethnographic accounts describing all-night communal dancing, singing, and clapping that help ritual specialists enter altered states of consciousness.
In this way, trance dances are not simply “religious” in the abstract; they are often described as practical community rites, connected to healing, social cohesion, and sometimes rainmaking, meaning the art may be documenting a living technology of survival as much as a belief system explains the Trance and Transformation in the San Great Dance (Origins Centre).
This is a tracing of the G3 dance scene, interpreted as dancing for entertainment. (Kumbani and Diaz-Andreu 2025)
Trance, Transformation, and the Clues Artists Left Behind
In the researchers’ reading, trance dance scenes tend to share a bundle of visual signals rather than a single “smoking gun.” These include figures arranged in circles, women clapping, bent or strained postures, and details that have been linked in previous scholarship to trance states - such as nosebleeds or partial transformation into animals.
This emphasis on transformation matches a broader interpretive tradition in southern African rock art studies, where human–animal blending (therianthropes) and distorted bodies are often understood as depictions of altered consciousness and spirit travel. The Origins Centre’s overview of the San “Great Dance,” for instance, explicitly connects trance to sensations of transformation and to imagery of beings crossing between worlds.
The study also flags a complication: some scenes show instruments (such as flutes or musical bows) that are not commonly emphasized in ethnographic descriptions of trance healing dances. Rather than forcing a single explanation, the authors treat this as evidence that rock art may capture multiple kinds of performance - ritual, social, and hybrid gatherings - some of which are difficult to sort cleanly from static imagery alone.
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Tracing of the Fulton's rock art depicting a girl's initiation ritual. ( Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand and The African Rock Art Digital Archive/Kumbani and Diaz-Andreu 2025)
Initiation Rituals: Rare, Regional, and Sometimes Hidden
Beyond trance, the researchers identify initiation-related imagery as another important category, especially girls’ initiation, sometimes associated in the literature with “eland dances.” A highlighted example comes from the Namahali site in the Free State, where figures’ forward-leaning posture is compared with ethnographic descriptions of initiation movement and ceremony.
Male initiation, by contrast, appears rarely in the dataset, with only one distinct case noted in the Western Cape. The authors suggest one plausible reason is secrecy: some initiation knowledge may have been restricted even within communities, making it less likely to be widely painted or publicly visible.
For a wider southern African comparison, Ancient Origins has previously reported on how rock art elsewhere can be interpreted as evidence of girls’ initiation rites, such as interpretations of the “dancing kudu” engravings in the Namib Desert of Namibia. While not San rock paintings from South Africa, the example shows how animals, posture, and ritual context can combine into a visual language of initiation.
Top image: A section of the Linton Panel, with San people dancing, in Africa’s Iziko National Museum in Cape Town. Source: Heribert Bechen/CC BY-SA 2.0
By Gary Manners
References
Díaz-Andreu, M. 2025. Exploring dance scenes in South African rock art: From Kwazulu-Natal to the Western Cape. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/143930180/Exploring_dance_scenes_in_South_African_rock_art_From_Kwazulu_Natal_to_the_Western_Cape
Kumbani, J. 2026. South African San rock art shows evidence of trance dances. Available at: https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/south-african-san-rock-art-trance-dances/
Origins Centre. n.d. Trance and Transformation in the San Great Dance. Available at: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/trance-and-transformation-in-the-san-great-dance-origins-centre/-gXxnvHUJ2LNvA?hl=en
