Two faint human figures, each about 9 centimeters tall, have been identified on the wall of the La Rochelle rock shelter in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Each is a patch of bare rock ringed by red paint and a halo of fine specks, the signature of stenciling. David Pearce of the University of the Witwatersrand, whose paper with Kiah Johnson of the University of Cambridge reports them, says they are the first stencils recorded in southern African rock art.
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The shelter has been on the books for decades, and its brush-painted animals were well known to researchers. The stencils escaped notice until photographs were sharpened with D-stretch software, an enhancement tool that pulls faded red pigment out of a rock surface. Even then, Pearce has said, it took time for the shapes to resolve into figures.
A stencil works as a negative image: the figure is the place where paint did not land. At La Rochelle each of the two humans shows up as bare stone outlined by a red field and a scatter of fine specks, which is the evidence the authors read as spray or splatter around a removed template. The faintness and small size, about 9 centimeters, help explain why the marks went unseen.
Two figures in a well-known shelter
La Rochelle, also called Klein Buffelspruit, is a shelter near Carolina in the Mpumalanga Highlands, about 30 meters long and 5 meters deep. According to Archaeology Magazine, it already holds brush-painted images of hartebeest, eland and humanoid beings, which fits the region’s reputation for painting with brush and finger. The new find is paint applied a different way, to the same wall.
The report appears as “First report of stencilled rock art in Mpumalanga, South Africa,” a Field and Technical Report in volume 81, issue 224 of the South African Archaeological Bulletin, pages 20 to 26, as Anthropology.net’s summary lists it. The authors describe the figures as apparently the first stencilled rock art recorded in southern Africa as far as they are aware, and they say the figures have no date and no parallel in the region.
The rarity is relative to the continent’s record, not to the world’s. Archaeology Magazine says stenciled art is almost unknown in southern Africa’s rock-art record and mentions a separate report of stenciled art from Indonesia dating to nearly 70,000 years ago. Stenciling is common elsewhere in the world, as the authors note, which makes the absence of it across a region with some of the densest painted shelters on the continent the real puzzle.
Missed for nearly thirty years
Anna Steyn first recorded the site in 1995, and Maseko documented it again in 2020, according to Archaeology Magazine’s coverage of the paper. Neither noted the stencils. The team sharpened its photographs with D-stretch software, and the marks are faint enough that earlier recorders likely overlooked them. A photo caption in the same report shows a concreted floor, pews and an improvised pulpit, a reminder that the shelter has had other uses.
Pearce described the moment of recognition in an interview with Phys.org, as quoted in Archaeology Magazine: “Then they popped into focus, a bit like optical illusions do.” Poland’s National Geographic edition adds that for a while he was not sure what he was looking at.
Blown paint and an unanswered date
Pearce suggests the two figures were made by blowing or splashing paint across a template, possibly made of beeswax, clay or wood, which was then removed. The authors argue it happened in one event. Southern African rock art is otherwise known for brush and finger painting, and Pearce told Archaeology Magazine that the region’s art is already among the most detailed anywhere in the world, which makes the absence of stenciling more striking.
He also speculates about where else the technique may have been used. In his words, maybe people stenciled art on bodies, on clothing, or on stone-built structures, none of which would survive the way pigment on a sheltered wall does. If so, the two figures at La Rochelle could be the only surviving trace of a practice that was more widespread than the rock record suggests.
The age is the larger gap. The stencils do not overlap any other painting, so their date relative to the rest of the art cannot be worked out by superposition. Direct dating is possible in principle; the Wits Rock Art Research Institute has developed radiocarbon protocols for rock art pigments, but the institute notes that weathering and mineral deposits on the walls complicate the results. Whether the red paint at La Rochelle can be sampled is not stated in the paper as reported.
Wits lists the 2017 Antiquity paper “The earliest directly dated rock paintings from southern Africa: new AMS radiocarbon dates” among its dating work, and the same page admits that a thorough chronology of the art is still the field’s major gap. Until someone samples the red at La Rochelle, the two small figures sit outside any timeline: Pearce and Johnson say the maker, the date and the meaning are all unknown.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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