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Game Pass shelter and surrounding landscape, with views of its main rock art panel and Rosetta Panel.
Image Credit:
Santos da Rosa et al., African Archaeological Review (2026)
Sound at Game Pass Shelter Adds a New Dimension to San Rock Art
A new archaeoacoustic study of Game Pass shelter in South Africa suggests that the famous San rock art site offered an acoustic environment well suited to clear speech, singing, rhythm and other sound-based activities, even though it lacks dramatic echoes or strong reverberation.
Game Pass is one of the best-known San rock art sites in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains. The shelter contains numerous paintings of eland and human figures and includes the celebrated “Rosetta Panel,” which has played an important role in interpretations of San ritual imagery.
Research on rock art acoustics has often focused on spectacular effects such as echoes, resonance or amplified sounds. Previous studies have asked whether such features influenced where ancient communities chose to paint or engrave rock surfaces.
The new study takes a different approach. Rather than asking whether unusual acoustics determined the location of the paintings, researchers investigated what kinds of sound-based activities the shelter itself could have supported.
To do this, they recorded impulse responses at different locations inside Game Pass. This method measures how a sound travels from a source to a listener and how surrounding surfaces reflect or modify it.
Researchers placed sound sources near the main painted panel and the Rosetta Panel and recorded the resulting acoustic responses from several listening positions. The measurements were designed to evaluate reverberation, clarity, speech definition and sound strength.
The results showed that Game Pass is acoustically relatively “dry.” In other words, sounds fade quickly rather than lingering in a long reverberant field.
This might initially seem unremarkable, but the researchers found that the shelter’s acoustic character could have offered important advantages.
Sound remained particularly clear and well defined, while early reflections from the rock surfaces increased its perceived strength at certain locations. Rather than producing a strong echo, the shelter reinforced direct sound without significantly blurring successive sounds together.
Such conditions could be especially useful for activities involving speech, music or rhythm. Songs and spoken narratives depend on words and vocal sequences remaining intelligible, while dancing accompanied by clapping, rattles or percussion requires individual beats to remain distinguishable.
The acoustic environment at Game Pass could therefore have supported performances in which groups needed to hear one another clearly while sound retained a noticeable presence within the shelter.
This interpretation is particularly interesting because San cultural practices documented ethnographically often involved sound alongside other forms of sensory engagement. Singing, clapping, rhythmic movement, storytelling and music all played important roles in social and ritual activities.
Rock paintings themselves may also have been experienced through more than sight alone. Researchers have increasingly considered touch, movement and sound as parts of a broader multisensory relationship between people, painted surfaces and ritual spaces.
At Game Pass, the acoustic measurements suggest that sounds produced near the painted panels would have remained clear rather than dissolving into reverberation, while receiving additional reinforcement in some of the areas where people could have interacted with the images.
The researchers emphasize, however, that these results do not prove that particular ceremonies, dances or performances took place at Game Pass. The measurements reveal what the acoustic environment could have supported, not what definitely occurred there.
The findings also challenge the idea that archaeological places need extraordinary echoes or resonances to be acoustically significant.
Instead, Game Pass demonstrates that a site can have meaningful auditory qualities simply because its physical setting supports particular forms of human activity. Low reverberation, high clarity and localized reinforcement may have been just as relevant to collective performance as more dramatic acoustic effects.
The study therefore encourages archaeologists to think about rock art shelters not only as visual spaces, but as environments where images, movement, sound and other senses may have interacted.
By reconstructing how Game Pass shaped sound, the research adds another dimension to understanding how San communities may have experienced one of southern Africa’s most important rock art landscapes.
Published on: 20-08-2026
Edited by: Abdulmnam Samakie
Source: African Archaeological Review
