Southern Africa’s first known stencil art found in a South African rock shelter

Two red figures, each only about 9 centimeters tall, have been sitting on a rock shelter wall in South Africa for who knows how long. Researchers now say they are the first stenciled rock art ever recorded in southern Africa, and the shelter still hosts church services today.

A shelter people already knew

The paintings sit in the La Rochelle rock shelter, near the town of Carolina in Mpumalanga province, eastern South Africa. The shelter is large for the area, roughly 30 meters long and 5 meters deep. Its walls already carry fine-line brush paintings of eland, hartebeest, small antelope and human-like figures, which fit the well-known rock art tradition of the region.

Other people have visited the site too. Wooden pews and a makeshift pulpit stand inside, the floor has been leveled and covered in concrete, and the space still occasionally hosts church services.

What the researchers found

David Pearce of the University of the Witwatersrand and Kiah Johnson of the University of Cambridge describe the find in the South African Archaeological Bulletin, in a paper titled First report of stencilled rock art in Mpumalanga, South Africa. The two small figures look like crude stick drawings. They have no hard outline. Instead, the paint is densest between the figures and fades into a halo of fine specks around them.

That pattern suggests someone blew or splashed liquid paint over a template, probably in a single event, and the template left a paint-free shape behind. That is the stencil technique. Hand stencils are famous from Ice Age caves in Europe and from sites in China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia, but nobody had reported stenciled art in southern Africa before. Pearce told Archaeology magazine he was not sure what he was looking at for a while, and that the figures then popped into focus, a bit like optical illusions.

Hiding in plain sight for decades

The shelter is not new to archaeologists. Anna Steyn recorded it in 1995, and Mduduzi Maseko recorded it again in 2020. Neither noted the stencils. The team used DStretch, an image enhancement tool, on its photographs, which helped the faint figures stand out from the rock.

What we still do not know

Many basic questions remain open. The authors do not know who made the stencils, when, or why. The stencils do not overlap any other paintings, so researchers cannot even say whether they came before or after the brush art.

The template is a mystery as well. Beeswax is one idea, given the importance of honey collection and bees in San tradition, but no wax objects have turned up. Clay, carved wood or bone, basketry and cut leather are other possibilities. If hunter-gatherers made the stencils, the authors note that preparing the template may have had ritual meaning, as paint-making did in San practice.

Why it matters

Pearce points out that southern Africa already has one of the most detailed and elaborate bodies of rock art anywhere in the world. Finding a technique nobody had seen in the region suggests the record may still hold surprises, even at sites that experts have visited more than once.

The researchers also suggest stenciling may have been more common than the surviving art implies. People may have used it on bodies, clothing or stone-built structures, which would not last the way painted rock faces can. Rain and wind may also have washed away stencils on exposed rock. Nobody has found examples of either, so this idea remains speculation for now.

A reminder to look again

For now, two palm-sized figures in a Mpumalanga shelter have quietly added a new chapter to southern African rock art. Dating them and identifying the template will take more work, and future visits to other shelters may reveal that these two are not alone.

Sources

• Pearce, D. G. and Johnson, K. (2026). First report of stencilled rock art in Mpumalanga, South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin. Author copy on Academia.edu
• Phys.org: Southern Africa’s first known stenciled rock art found hiding in plain sight
• Archaeology magazine: Stenciled Rock Art Found in South Africa
• Archaeology News Online: First stencilled rock art in southern Africa found in a Mpumalanga shelter