South African photographer, Joe Alfers, enthralled a U3A audience about his visual enhancement of Lesotho rock art paintings document over a period of six years from 1979-1985 that revolutionised the recording of these precious works.
Dubbed the Analysis of Rock Art in Lesotho ( ARAL Project) was established as a systematic research and documentation initiative to record the rich and extensive rock art of Lesotho.
Alfers was not the originator of the project, but his body of field work along with colleagues, is a crucial recording of rock art history of the San (Bushmen) artists and other hunter-gatherer groupings.
The project was undertaken through the National University of Lesotho, where the academic need was to document, analyse, and preserve the rock paintings found throughout its rugged landscapes.
“The goal of the project was to visually document the enhancement of images of rock paintings and to reveal a previously unseen aspect of the paintings,” said Alfers. Several academic publications gave exposure to the various exhibitions.
“The project ran full time from 1979 to 1985 until funding ran out. The (ARAL) project was conceptualised by Lucas Smits a geographer at the University of Lesotho who came to Lesotho in 1961 as teacher at the Catholic Centre of Lesotho College that later became the National University of Lesotho.”
Smits is credited, with conducting the first serious, systematic survey of rock art along the Phuthiatsana River and within Sehlabathebe National Park. His work, which documented 85 sites in the park, established a crucial foundation for subsequent archaeological research in the region.
“The funding for the project came from the Dutch government and the funding stretched out for six years,” said Alfers.
“The ARAL project set out to be different … we gathered a significant amount of data in demarcated areas such as catchment areas of rivers; every rock space would be searched along the Clarens Sandstone formations sandstone in Lesotho,” he said.
The Clarens Sandstone is a geological formation in South Africa and Lesotho known for its distinctive, massive cliffs and its role as a premier canvas for San rock art, as well as a rich source of fossils.
“Once demarcated, every cliff, shelter, boulder was covered in the project; we had developed methods of searching and our method of searching was estimated at having a 98% success rate,” said Alfers.
He said the team developed a recording and interpretation methodology, which meant recording the paintings by tracing them.
“Transparent material was placed over rock face and would be traced by someone familiar with rock paintings. These were placed on transparent film. We had to be very careful transferring tracing to the studio where it was made in to a drawing.”
Alfers believed at the time however, that this did not represent an objective method, and what one saw was merely an interpretation of the person drawing the paintings. If the person drawing the art missed any detail there would be no other way but to return to the original site to gauge whether it was a true interpretation.
“We then presented paper in 1981 at a SA Archaeological Association conference and proposed a photographic method of recording, regarding that as more objective, though it still needed to be determined what was painted and traced could be corroborated.
“Our method was a more accurate and verifiable account. It was expensive using film and took time but fortunately we had funding,” said Alfers.
The ARAL Project combined systematic field survey, photography, and ethnographic annotation. Field teams — often led by a senior researcher with assistants including Alfers — travelled on foot or by vehicle into remote areas to locate rock art sites. Alfers reckoned they had covered about 17,000kms by the time they had finished the project.
Alfers explained to his audience that once a site was located, documentation followed a consistent methodology. The team recorded precise locations and topographic context for each site. These included GPS coordinates or hand-drawn maps (later digitised) and site reports. Where possible, the team contextualised images with known ethnographic or archaeological understanding.
Although originally compiled as analogue slides and paper reports, the ARAL collection underwent digitization decades later.
The archive — now housed at institutions such as the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand and curated in digital form within the African Rock Art Digital Archive (ARADA) — has been converted into high-resolution digital masters and reference files.
Alfers has worked at a photographer in engineering and in media studies at then-University of Bophutatswana (North West University). At Rhodes University, he was promoted as technology manager of the newly-created school of journalism and media studies developing and managing TV and radio studios and a multi-media online computer laboratory. Currently he acts as administrator of project ARAL.
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This article was first published in Talk of the Town, February 5, 2026. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays
