This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Scratches on the Face: Antiquity and Contemporaneity in South African Art. The marking of the 'face of the country' is so much a part of the human project in southern Africa. In pre-colonial times it took the form of ancient rock engravings, at another it articulated boundaries where people could or could not live because of their skin colour, it resulted in the deepest and most invasive scars in the earth ever made in the rapacious extraction of mineral wealth.