San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly destructive aspects of the colonial project. Forging new societies from heterogeneous sources, they engaged in prolonged armed insurgency, recording their exploits, presence and beliefs in the rock-art archive of the Maloti-Drakensberg. These images reference conflict and trauma, conventionally interpreted as visions of spiritual warfare. However, viewed through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), deeper dimensions emerge. PTSD is the culturally subjective experience of generalizable neuropathologies which develop following a traumatic event. Diagnosable in diverse communities worldwide, it nonetheless requires insider idioms to understand its local expressions. We explore how PTSD manifested in this historic and cultural context; how its symptomatic social dysfunctions would have been understood in forager aetiology, and how its intrusive flashbacks would have intruded on altered-state experiences induced to heal the consequences of violence. We find that the artists were not passive victims of trauma, but rather used art symbolically to reconsolidate individual and collective understandings of traumatic events.

十九世纪南部非洲的桑族采集者被迫适应殖民计划的巨大破坏性。他们利用不同来源打造新社会，从事长期的武装叛乱，在马洛蒂-德拉肯斯堡的岩石艺术档案中记录了他们的功绩、存在和信仰。这些图像涉及冲突和创伤，通常被解释为精神战争的景象。然而，从创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）的角度来看，更深层次的问题出现了。创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）是在创伤事件后发生的普遍神经病理学的文化主观体验。它可以在世界各地的不同社区中进行诊断，但仍然需要内部习语来理解其当地表达方式。我们探讨创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 在这一历史和文化背景下是如何表现的；如何在觅食者病因学中理解其症状性的社会功能障碍，以及其侵入性的闪回将如何侵入为了治愈暴力后果而诱发的改变状态的经历。我们发现艺术家并不是创伤的被动受害者，而是象征性地利用艺术来重新巩固个人和集体对创伤事件的理解。