Southern African rock art includes a very large body of painted and engraved eland imagery, and since the 1970s the dominant scholarly reading, developed by David Lewis-Williams and others, has drawn on Ju/'hoansi ethnography, including the Eland Bull Dance, to interpret much of that imagery as connected to San ritual life, healing trance and rites such as this one rather than to simple hunting record. Megan Biesele's work on Ju/'hoan folklore and ideology situates the puberty rite within a wider symbolic world in which the eland stands for abundance, fertility and right relations between people, echoed across story, song and image.
That reading is argued rather than universally accepted. Critics of the rock-art interpretation caution that using twentieth century ethnography from one community to explain images made over a much longer span, and in some cases by groups with no demonstrated continuity to the Ju/'hoansi, risks projecting a single explanation onto a much more varied record. The atlas records the connection between the ceremony and the rock art as a scholarly reading rather than an established fact, consistent with how it already treats the same argument on the San Religion entry.
Sources The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of ArtDavid Lewis-Williams with Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoanMegan Biesele