Rodger Smith took me to this amazing series of three sites in the Kouga back in the year 2000. I could see straightaway that they were unusual because they showed people hunting with nets. But it wasn’t just an illustration of people hunting with nets. There was much more to it. It turned out to be a curious story about people catching eland and hartebeest in web nets. The nets look like spider webs. Now you can’t catch big animals like eland and hartebeest in a net. They would probably just jump over the net or they would break it. So this is not everyday reality, the artists are showing us that this is happening in another realm. In this realm the web nets would work to catch eland and hartebeest because they are not ordinary nets, they would be sticky, strong and elastic. The more the animals struggled the more they would entangle themselves.
A hunter with a long spear sits watching three nets. The right-hand photo is a grayscale version
This is what the nets look like
And you can see how much the nets (at left) look like spider webs (middle) compared with another San painting of a net (right) which is much more like a real net.
The nets are anchored by a pole
Eland and hartebeest. The hunters may be driving them towards the nets
This hunter is running above the herd of eland and hartebeest (i.e. in the previous picture) to get behind them to drive the animals into the nets (see pics below)
Hunter watching over three web-nets. To their right is a running figure with a long spear
