The eBusingatha Puzzle: a digital restoration of a painted rock shelter

eBusingatha (also known as Cinyati and uMhwabane) is a partially collapsed rock shelter containing hunter-gatherer paintings located in the AmaZizi Traditional Authority Area of the Northern Drakensberg (Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa). A scattered and fragmentary historical record tracks its demise, in documents and images, since the 1920s. Not only have the paintings suffered severe natural weathering and damage by people, but so has the natural sandstone architecture within which the paintings were created. One of the most dramatic events in its history took place in 1947 and involved the removal by a stone mason of large painted blocks that are now housed in a museum. I examine the record relating to this shelter and show how proponents of rock art studies have removed the paintings from the shelter – literally and through the production of copies – in order to protect, exhibit and study them. I then attempt to put the shelter back together digitally, interrogating the status of rock paintings as both images and objects. In the course of this digital restoration, I look at how the removal, copying and return of the paintings to their original context influences the way the paintings are understood and interpreted.