South Africa's prolific rock art has always attracted visitors fascinated by the images of humans and animals painted on to rock overhangs and caves by San, or Bushmen artists, hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
But few of these visitors are able to appreciate the significance of what they're seeing, other than on a superficial aesthetic level.
Now that is set to change, at least in the Clanwilliam area of the rock art-rich Cedarberg, thanks to an innovative project that is the brainchild of John Parkington, professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town.
Parkington, who has been involved in excavations and research in the areas since the 1960s, and several fellow archaeologists, historians, educators and artists, have initiated the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, whereby local people are being trained to act as tour guides and interpret rock art meaningfully for visitors, among other things.
The project is aimed at adding another dimension to the area's already significant tourism potential - with all the attendant economic benefits - as well as providing sustainable job opportunities, and boosting a general appreciation of the area's rich and valuable cultural history.
Backed by funding from the government and Anglo American - and just this month with an additional R488 000 from the Lotto - the project is employing 20 trainee entrepreneurs for 17 months.
During this training period, they will learn to set up their own businesses as specialist tourist guides in the area - specifically for rock art sites - and to produce a variety of related crafts for sale to tourists.
The course, which started in November, teaches the trainees about the heritage of the Clanwilliam area, and about the tourism industry in general.
One of the trainees' tasks is to design, build and equip a rock art trail in the Clanwilliam area, which will be partly on private land and and partly on public land.
"Then we'll try to expand that for other places," says Parkington.
"The idea is to upgrade the experience that tourists are already getting, by providing more information on what the paintings mean.
"While there is some written information available at a couple of local sites, this is not as informative or enriching as it might be."
Parkington says there was a similar initiative in the United States during the depression years, when unemployed people were given sponsored jobs on archaeological sites.
"It got the archaeological work done, it opened up an awareness of heritage, and it provided jobs - it really was a win-win situation."
So it was perhaps not surprising that President Thabo Mbeki responded positively to Parkington's suggestion that something similar could be developed here - particularly because his proposed initiative tied in so well with the president's African Renaissance vision, since transformed into the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).
"I realised that we'd taken a lot out of the Clanwilliam area - literally, in the form of artefacts, but also figuratively, in the form of knowledge, and I wanted to put some of it back," says Parkington.
Another aspect of their project is a two-day course on learning to "Read the Landscape", aimed at pupils from grades 8 to 10, which involves an integrated curriculum of field visits to local sites, computer-based work sessions, and guided discussions.
Pupils are taught to read a landscape by recognising visible patterns and learning to explain them - for example, geographical, geological and palaeontological features like the valley structure of the Olifants River, and shale outcrops which contain trilobite fossils. (A trilobite is an extinct arthropod - a hard-shelled, jointed-body animal with a pointed tail looking a bit like a woodlouse - which lived in the sea between about 400 million and 300 million years ago.)
They're also taught about the significance and fragility of both natural resources, like the complex and diverse fynbos of the area, and cultural resources like local rock art, and how archaeology provides an understanding of early people.
"The landscape is full of traces and you need to learn how to read them," says Parkington.
"They're there, and people see them when they walk past, but they don't recognise them for what they are."