Lewis-Williams, J. David

   South African rock art researcher who proposed a shamanistic interpretation (also known as the “trance hypothesis”) to some of this diverse imagery. Attending to the similarities between the Southern African material and European Paleolithic cave art, Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson developed a neuropsychological model for establishing whether a given rock art tradition is derived from altered states of consciousness, and if so, how it is shamanistic, within its specific community context. Lewis-Williams has also written a volume on cave art (The Mind in the Cave, 2002) and the European Neolithic. LewisWilliams is professor emeritus of rock art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.