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<< Text Pages >> Inanke Cave - Cave or Rock Shelter in Zimbabwe

Submitted by Andy B on Saturday, 06 February 2010  Page Views: 8893

Natural PlacesSite Name: Inanke Cave Alternative Name: Matobo National Park, Matobos Hills
Country: Zimbabwe
NOTE: This site is 114.634 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Bulawayo
Latitude: 20.55S  Longitude: 28.508000E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
3 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
5 Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3

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External Links:

Rock Shelter in Zimbabwe. San (Bushmen) lived in the Matobo Hills about 2,000 years ago, leaving a rich heritage in hundreds of rock paintings. There are over 3,000 registered rock art sites, with the main periods of painting being between 320 and 500 C.E.. In the many crevices and caves, clay ovens and other historic artefacts have been found, and various archaeological finds date back as far as the Pre-Middle Stone Age, around 300,000 B.P.

The following major sites have been developed for tourist access:

Bambata Cave is also a major archaeological site, located in the west of the national park, north of the game park on the Kezi-Bulawayo road. The frieze includes elephants, giraffes, warthogs, tsessebe and mongoose.

Inanke Cave has the most extensive paintings, located in a remote cave accessible by a three-hour hike from Toghwana Dam. Along the route of the hike is an iron age furnace.

Nswatugi Cave contains beautiful friezes of giraffes, elephants and kudu. Access is from Circular Drive, west of Maleme Dam

Pomongwe Cave, near Maleme Dam, was damaged by a preservation attempt in 1965, where linseed oil was applied to the paintings[19]. Archaeological digs within and downslop of the cave revealed 39,032 stone tools, several hearths, with the main fire-making areas were in the centre of the cave floor. Bone fragments showed that hyrax formed a major part of the meat component of the diet of early human inhabitants of the cave, which also included tortoise and larger game animals. The oldest material on the site is probably pre-Middle Stone Age.

White Rhino Shelter is a small site near Gordon Park, on the main tarred road through the park. The frieze includes the outline of a large rhinos, which is said to have inspired the re-introduction of the species in the 1960s.

Source: Wikipedia

IMPORTANT NOTE: Location given is approximate

Note: "For visitors able to reach Inanke, the reward is unsurpassed." - prehistoric paintings are a celebration of life, see comment
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Nearby Images from Flickr
Maleme Dam in the Matobo Hills National Park
Agama
Agama2
PinCushion
Malene Dam. Matobo National Park
Matobo National Park

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 6.3km N 6° World's View Matobo National Park* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 11.8km WNW 296° Bambata Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 205.7km SSE 157° Machete I Rock Art
 254.7km E 83° Great Zimbabwe* Ancient Village or Settlement
 348.5km W 269° Makgadikgadi* Ancient Village or Settlement
 363.5km S 184° Palala River Bluffs San Rock Paintings* Rock Art
 489.5km NNW 331° Sikaunda petroglyphs Rock Art
 490.2km SSW 210° Matsieng Footprints Rock Art
 579.5km S 183° African Window* Museum
 596.6km S 186° Malapa* Cave or Rock Shelter
 610.2km SSE 158° Bantu stone circles* Standing Stones
 612.9km S 187° Sterkfontein* Cave or Rock Shelter
 678.2km SSE 158° Lion Cavern Ngwenya Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 735.8km WNW 285° Tsodilo Hills* Rock Art
 783.0km SSW 199° Wolmaransstad Rock Art Rock Art
 801.7km SSE 154° Border Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 884.1km SSW 202° Stowlands Rock art Rock Art
 926.4km NE 42° Chongoni Rock Art Rock Art
 953.9km SSW 211° Wonderwerk Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 968.6km SW 214° Kathu Pan* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 977.9km SSW 203° Nooitgedacht Rock art Rock Art
 983.1km SSW 203° Wildebeestkuil* Rock Art
 986.4km SSW 202° McGregor Museum Museum
 989.6km S 173° Kamberg rock art Rock Art
 1013.7km S 175° Ikanti Shelter I Rock Art
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"Inanke Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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Magnificence on Cave Walls by Andy B on Saturday, 06 February 2010
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The trail to the great cave of Inanke in southern Zimbabwe begins confidently with arrows painted on bare patches of granite and soon vanishes into four miles of often pathless wandering through fields of shoulder-high grass, dense scrub forests and formidable thorn bushes. Without the direction of our guide, the archaeologist Paul Hubbard, our group would never have found this cave containing some of the most magnificent prehistoric paintings in the world. But reach the approximately 30-foot-long frieze of intricately varied paintings and you will find it free of the man-made barriers, tourist hype and even substitution by reproductions that prevent modern visitors from directly experiencing most of the ancient sites in Europe.

The cave is one of hundreds painted by the San people (commonly called Bushmen) about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago and located in what is now Matobo National Park, an area best-known in recent years as a successful sanctuary for white and black rhinoceros. A sign at the entrance cautions visitors that "anyone seen or suspected of poaching activities may be shot on sight," and a ramble to the caves can entail an encounter with these solitary beasts or machine-gun-toting rangers, not to mention ubiquitous packs of baboons raging at trespassers crossing their territories. The park also contains a large population of leopards.

Unlike the dark, underground caves of Lascaux or Altamira in Europe, those in Matobo are located high up granite slopes in shelves scooped from the sides of the hills. They are shelters filled with light and open to surrounding vistas. Beneath Inanke's encompassing dome, herds of giraffe, eland, kudu, ostrich and duiker, among others, fill a broad painted band running the length of the back wall just above eye level. They offer a celebration of life equal to any of the mural cycles of the Renaissance. Generally rendered in silhouettes of ochre ranging from tan to mulberry in tone, this dense profusion of wildlife includes a giraffe so subtly modeled in yellow and white that one of the leading experts on African rock art, Peter Garlake, has called it the finest animal painting in the country. Next to this vivid creature, seven stick-figure men march in file with weapons on their shoulders, and many other human figures are scattered among the animals. But these are far from simple hunting scenes.

A succession of highly unrealistic forms dominate the middle of the frieze and several peripheral areas. One figure towers over the menagerie, an extremely attenuated personage with the body of a man whose head is shrunk to a tiny knob and whose shoulders sprout branchlike stems. His upper torso leans forward as if struggling to stand, and lines of reddish pigment cascade to the ground from his armpits. He stands on two expansive ovals, both filled with dots, a design that is repeated in at least 16 similarly rounded and dotted shapes at the center of the wall. These ciphers define the meaning of the paintings for the San.

Unlike the images in European caves, whose cultures are lost, these can be interpreted with considerable clarity because of the pioneering work of 19th-century linguists who learned the "click" language of the San and recorded beliefs that seem to have endured for millennia. This evidence has enabled archaeologists to unlock the significance of the many fantastic images in the San paintings.

Much more, with photos in the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003441739599812.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_LeadStoryNA
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