Saharan Rock Art Caught Between Fields
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Saharan Rock Art: an Archaeology of Relational Ontologies in North African Prehistory
Evans-Pritchard Lectures 2018 Dr Emmanuelle Honoré Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow - McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge Saharan Rock Art: An Archaeology of Relational Ontologies in North African Prehistory Archaeological data testify to the flourishing cultural development of Late Prehistoric communities during the last favourable interval in North Africa, before the large-scale desertification process that affected the Sahara around 3500 BC. This interval was also the moment for major transformations in the long-term history of Africa, with the adoption of pastoralism that made North African populations shift from a hunter-gatherer to a semi-nomadic pastoralist way of life. Based on the fieldwork I have conducted in the Eastern Sahara, this series of lectures aims to explore post- Pleistocene adaptations through the lens of transformations of the social world. How did the last hunters and the first pastoralists perceive and conceive the world and their relation to the world? What changes in their worldviews accompanied the development of the earliest African pastoralism? Wednesday, 2 May (Week 2) Changing Views of a Changing World: A Relation to Territories, Resources and Landscape in the Context of Holocene Environmental Changes Tuesday, 8 May (Week 3) Images of an Imagined World: The Complex Mythologies of the Last Hunter-Gatherers Tuesday, 15 May (Week 4) The Animal as Anima: The Role of Cattle in the Worldviews of Early African Pastoralist Societies Tuesday, 22 May (Week 5) Subsistence as Giving Some Substance: The Organization of Tasks and Social Relations amongst the Last Hunters and First Pastoralists Thursday, 24 May (Week 5) Towards a Palaeosociological Approach: Relational Ontologies and the Constitution of ‘Being in Society’ in North African late Prehistory All lectures take place at 5.00 pm in the Old Library, All Souls College Open to the public – all welcome . -
Saharan Rock Art. Archaeology of Tassilian Pastoral Iconography. by Augustin F
BOOK REVIEW Saharan Rock Art. Archaeology of Tassilian Pastoral Iconography. By Augustin F. C. Holl. African Archaeology Series. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, 2004, 192 pages. ISBN Paperback 0-7591-0605-3. Price: UK£ 22.95. The rock art of the Sahara is world class, but it series of vignettes that correspond to the annual has tended to be ignored by rock art specialists out- rhythms of pastoral transhumant life. The two panels side Saharan studies. This was underlined by omission are suggested as a narrative in the form of an allegory of any mention of Saharan art in CHIPPINDALE & or play in six acts. Act I (or Composition I) has five TAÇONs (1998) edited volume on world rock art. The scenes that deal with arrival at a camp site, setting up reasons for this may be partially due to most Saharan camp and watering the animals. Act II has three scenes rock art researchers being either French or Italian, but that deal with transit to a new camp. Act III is the new more probably due to the history of work being limited camp site that anticipates some important event, which to dating sequences (MUZZOLINI 1993) and concentra- is suggested as being gift-giving and the birth of a tion on purely collecting data to contrast styles new child. Act IV is the continuation of camp life into (SANSONI 1994). This has meant that theoretical frame- the dry season, but is seen as a metaphor for life works have tended to be abstract and general, mostly events and the new generation. -
Mythology and Legend, by JEAN- LOIC LE QUELLEC, Transla
RockArt Research 2007 h,me 24, Nurnbcr 2, 261 RAR REVIEW Rock art in Africa: mythology and legend, by JEAN- basis in ethnology? LOIC LE QUELLEC, translated Paul Bahn. 2004. Le Quellcc's magisterial command of knowledge by in Editions Flammarion, Paris, 212 pages, 272 plates, about 'shn.in rock art is amply reflected the book's in colour, 30 x 24 cm, hardcover, first chaph'r. There is some over-interpretation of motifs mostly bibliography, where a liberal use of marks would have been of US$6500, ISBN 9-782080-304445. quotation benefit. For instance, the several superb lycanthropic (not of the Messak Peintures et d'avant les du Sahara 'lycaon-headed') images Libyan (pp. 26-29) gravures pharaons: may well have been intended to depict theriantropes with au Nil, by JEAN-1.0IC LE QUELLEC, PAULINE canine heads - or crocodilian, or whatever else - we DE FLERS and PHILIPPE DE FLERS. 2005. Libraire simply cannot know. Le Quellec quite rightly emphasises Arthème Fayard/ Editions Soleb, 382 pages, several the strong presence of sexual subject matters in the Sahara, hundred colour plates, bibliography, 36 x 28 cm, particularly in the petroglyphs, and he dismantles the hardcover, ¬100,00, ISBN 2-213-62488-7. popular interpretation of de Almásy's 'swimmers'. The section on the 'intertropical zone' focuses on spec Jean-Loïc Le Quellec's one dozen or so booksare among tacular painting sites in southern Mali, the apparently the most valuable additions to the study ofrock artin recent sparse rock art of Gabon, Zaire and Congo, and the pre decades, and also among the most handsome. -
Thematic Study on Rock Art Africa
Sub-Zone 1: Mauritania - Western Sahara Joaquim SOLER SUBILS Institut für Ur- und Frügeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters (Tübingen, Germany) 1. Profile of Zone: The archaeological context Although archaeological research in the Western Sahara has not been so long and intense as in the neighbouring countries of Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, since the forties we know that the rock art heritage of this zone is huge and diverse. Rock art is more abundant in the eastern part of the country, whereas it disappears towards the coast (fig. 1). However the presence of some sites on the coast (in El Aaiún, for example) indicates that the reason of such gradual disappearance may be due to geological reasons. The Neogene coastal platform is a flatland constituted by fossiliferous limestone and dunes, without caves or rock-shelters of importance. That context is less prone to rock art production or preservation. The Western Saharan images belong to several different traditions, which at the moment we can poorly relate with each other. Some natural particularities explain a part of the regional diversity for the rock art in the Western Sahara. The rock-shelters of the Zemmur, for example, are favourable to paintings and not to engravings, whereas the thousands of fine dark horizontal slabs found in the north-east (a zone with scarce or inexistent rock-shelters) were engaging for the engravers. The differences in the styles and the subjects depicted, on the other hand is a result of social and ecological changes. Unfortunately at this moment we can only notice those historical and ecological changes in the rock art, but we are still unable to explain what produced such evolutions in the prehistory of the Western Sahara. -
SAHARAN ROCK ART Green Sahara
SAHARAN ROCK ART Tadrart Acacus, Libya Extraordinary images of animals and people from time when the Sahara was greener and more like a savannah have been left behind. Engravings of hippos and crocodiles are offered as evidence of a wetter climate. [Source: David Coulson, National Geographic, June 1999; Henri Lhote, National Geographic, August 1987] Most of the Saharan rock is found in Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Niger and to a lesser extent Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and some of the Sahel countries. Particularly rich areas include the Air mountains in Niger, the Tassili-n-Ajjer plateau in southeastern Algeria, and the Fezzan region of southwest Libya. Some of the art found in the Sahara region is strikingly similar to rock art found in southern Africa. Scholars debate whether it has links to European prehistoric cave art or is independent of that. The rock art of Sahara was largely unknown 1957 when French ethnologist Henri Lhote launched a major expedition to Tassili-n-Ajjer. He spent 12 months on the plateau with a team of painters, many of whom were hired by Lhote off the streets in Montmarte in Paris. The painters copied thousands of rock painting, in may cases tracing the outlines on paper and then filling them in with gouache. When the copies were displayed they created quite a stir, especially the images of figures that looked like space aliens. Lhote first visited the area in 1934, traveling from the oasis village of Djanet with a 30 camel caravan. Contact: Trust for African Rock Art run by David Coulson; Exhibit: Memories of Stone at the Museum of Man in Paris displayed painted copies of the images found in Tassili-n-Ajjir. -
Rock Art When the Sahara Was Not a Desert
The Sahara, dispersal route and / or barrier to migrations: drawing on central Sahara (Algeria and Libya) rock art when the Sahara was not a desert. Miguel Caparros∗1 1Mus´eumNational d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) { D´epartement de Pr´ehistoire: Equipede Pal´eontologie Humaine, UMR 7194 CNRS { France R´esum´e The rock art paintings from the Tassili, Algeria, first inventoried and made famous by Henri Lhote in 1958, are testimony of a most striking feature of the African climate his- tory, namely the transformation of the increasingly arid Sahara during the Pleistocene into a humid and green landscape sprinkled of lakes during the Early-Middle Holocene (EMH, 11 to 5.5 ka BP). The " t^etesrondes" paintings are evidence of a Saharo-Sudanese neolithic culture contemporaneous with the onset of this humid period in the Sahara. This dramatic humid period in the Sahara is well documented by vatious paleoenvironment studies. We present here various rock art illustrations representative of the EMH in the central Sa- hara from six trips undertaken from 2006 to 2011 in Algeria (Tassili and Immidir) and Libya (Acacus, Tassili and Messak). On the basis of these trips and recent palaeoenvironment and prehistoric research by various workers, we raise the question: was the humidification and greening of the Sahara a unique event? It woul seem that the response is negative. Evidence of alternating wet and dry episodes in the Sahara and eastern Africa during at least the last 250 ka due principally to the northern migration of the summer ITCZ leads us to think that while the Sahara might have been an insurmountable ecological barrier during extreme arid conditions, probably preventing human dispersals from southern Africa during glacial periods, it became a natural migratory path during humid periods (coeval with northern hemisphere deglaciations) when the Sahara was covered of grasslands. -
Images Re-Vues, 14 | 2017 Kapwani Kiwanga’S Alien Speculations 2
Images Re-vues Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l'art 14 | 2017 Extraterrestre Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations Gavin Steingo Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/4051 DOI: 10.4000/imagesrevues.4051 ISSN: 1778-3801 Publisher: Centre d’Histoire et Théorie des Arts, Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, UMR 8210 Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques Electronic reference Gavin Steingo, “Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations”, Images Re-vues [Online], 14 | 2017, Online since 03 November 2017, connection on 30 January 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ imagesrevues/4051 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/imagesrevues.4051 This text was automatically generated on 30 January 2021. Images Re-vues est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations 1 Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations Gavin Steingo AUTHOR'S NOTE I would like to thank the editorial committee for excellent feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to Peter Szendy, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Jean-Loïc Le Quellec for helpful comments and discussions. Finally, I must offer a mighty thank you to Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet for seeing this project through from beginning to end. Introduction Images Re-vues, 14 | 2017 Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations 2 1 Between the mid-nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries, many European authors invested considerable effort to illustrate that Africans are incapable of genius and civilization. Unable to fathom that an African society might have constructed what we today know as Great Zimbabwe, German geographer Karl Mauch (1837-1875) and British archaeologist James Theodore Bent (1852-1897) developed fanciful historical narratives. -
Musée De L'homme
LE NOUVEAU MUSÉE DE L’HOMME LE NOUVEAU MUSÉE DE L’HOMME MUSÉE LE NOUVEAU 9,50 € MUSEEDELHOMME-COUV-bonneimage.indd 1 13/11/2015 10:45 1878-1937-2015 LES TROIS RÉVOLUTIONS DU PALAIS DU TROCADÉRO Les mutations d’une icône architecturale BAT-12-11_10H00_HS MUSEE HOMME AS.indd 14 13/11/2015 08:49 UN SITE D’EXCEPTION Pour les touristes adeptes des bateaux- mouches, c’est évidemment l’une des plus belles perspectives de la capitale : d’un côté le palais de Chaillot avec dans le lointain la marque du XXIe siècle, La Défense ; de l’autre, le monument le plus symbolique de Paris (d’où est prise la photographie), la tour Eifel. BAT-12-11_10H00_HS MUSEE HOMME AS.indd 15 13/11/2015 08:49 LES TROIS RÉVOLUTIONS DU PALAIS DU TROCADÉRO 3 L’histoire de l’Homme méritait un palais : immense, il couvrit la colline du Trocadéro. Elle méritait aussi la 7 lisibilité, la lumière : toutes deux ont été les objectifs prioritaires des architectes. PAR CHRISTINE DESMOULINS 9 omment adapter un 4 bâtiment qui a connu C plusieurs vies à sa nou- velle mission ? Après une décennie d’études et de chan- tier, la nouvelle image du Musée de l’Homme apparaît enfn. Au sein du patchwork architectural de ce grand monument classé, où 5 le palais hispano-mauresque inau- guré en 1878 et son extension 9 néoclassique de 1937 s’entre- mêlent, les architectes Brochet- Lajus-Pueyo et Emmanuel Nebout ont écrit un nouveau palimpseste. 8 En colonisant la structure de l’édifce, ils la bouleversent avec respect. -
Morocco's Rock
Arts 2013, 2, 35-43; doi:10.3390/arts2010035 OPEN ACCESS arts ISSN 2076-0752 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Brief Report Morocco’s Rock Art: Age and Meaning Susan Searight 42 Rue Franceville, Casablanca 20410, Morocco; E-Mail: [email protected]. Received: 28 January 2013; in revised form: 5 February 2013 / Accepted: 6 February 2013 / Published: 8 February 2013 Abstract: The general distribution of the rock art sites in Morocco is indicated in this report. The vast majority are situated in southern Morocco, in the region of the River Draa and further south. One important exception is the High Atlas mountain range. The location of these sites is shown to be fairly standardised. Four different groups of engravings are identified, based on technique and theme. In the absence of any direct dating of the engravings, these groups can only be placed in a relative chronological order, using dates known for climatic conditions and the introduction of animals or objects. A problem concerns the reliability of these ‘known’ dates, often based on extrapolation from dated information from neighbouring countries. Two recent excavations close to rock art sites have yielded C14 dates for population presence in the area without advancing knowledge on the date of the rock art. The reason for sites’ geographical situation in the landscape can probably be surmised reasonably accurately, but the interpretation of this art remains largely a matter of speculation and intelligent guesswork. Current projects aimed to advance knowledge of the age of the art are described. Keywords: Morocco, rock art, chronology, research, meaning 1. -
Saharan Rock Art: Local Dynamics and Wider Perspectives
Arts 2013, 2, 350-382; doi:10.3390/arts2040350 OPEN ACCESS arts ISSN 2076-0752 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Article Saharan Rock Art: Local Dynamics and Wider Perspectives Marina Gallinaro * Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità, Sapienza Università di Roma, Via dei Volsci 122, 00185 Rome, Italy; E-Mail: [email protected] * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: [email protected] Received: 31 October 2013; in revised form: 12 November 2013 / Accepted: 14 November 2013 / Published: 10 December 2013 Abstract: Rock art is the best known evidence of the Saharan fragile heritage. Thousands of engraved and painted artworks dot boulders and cliffs in open-air sites, as well as the rock walls of rockshelters and caves located in the main massifs. Since its pioneering discovery in the late 19th century, rock art captured the imagination of travellers and scholars, representing for a long time the main aim of research in the area. Chronology, meaning and connections between the different recognized artistic provinces are still to be fully understood. The central massifs, and in particular the "cultural province" encompassing Tadrart Acacus and Tassili n’Ajer, played and still play a key role in this scenario. Recent analytical and contextual analyses of rock art contexts seem to open new perspectives. Tadrart Acacus, for the richness and variability of artworks, for the huge archaeological data known, and for its proximity to other important areas with rock art (Tassili n’Ajjer, Algerian Tadrart and Messak massifs) is an ideal context to analyze the artworks in their environmental and social-cultural context, and to define connections between cultural local dynamics and wider regional perspectives. -
The Future of Africa's Past
The Future of Africa's Past Proceedings of the 2004 TARA Rock Art Conference Nairobi Trust for African Rock Art Janette Deacon, Editor About TARA TARA, a Nairobi based non-governmental not-for- Since 1996 TARA has recorded rock art in over 16 profit organization, is committed to promoting the African countries; created an archive of over 20,000 awareness and preservation of Africa’s unique rock rock art photographs; produced a major illustrated art heritage. Its mission is to “create greater global book, African Rock Art, Paintings and Engravings awareness of the importance and endangered state on Stone, by David Coulson and Alec Campbell; of Africa’s rock art; survey sites; monitor status; be published articles in National Geographic Magazine, an information resource and archive; and promote Time Magazine, USA Today, London Times and and support rock art conservation measures”. other international publications; worked with the Government of Niger to conserve that country’s The Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) was rock art; helped to prevent destruction of 10,000 founded in 1996 by international photographer year old rock engravings by oil prospectors, hosted David Coulson with the support of palaeontologist an international rock art conference in Nairobi Mary Leakey. The goals of TARA are to create a (2004); staged East African rock art awareness permanent visual archive of Africa’s rock art before exhibitions in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar; it is too late, share this priceless archive with the made videos; conducted lecture tours and generally world community, and, to the extent possible, promoted the conservation of African rock art preserve today’s most threatened rock art sites, round the world. -
~.THE DIGGING STICK Volume 23, No 1 ISSN 1013-7521 April 2006
~.THE DIGGING STICK Volume 23, No 1 ISSN 1013-7521 April 2006 NORTHERN AUSTRALIAN ROCK ART, SOUTHERN AFRICAN ROCK ART - SO SIMILAR, SO DIFFERENT Christopher Chippindale Perhaps it is in the nature of former colonies that African rock art culturally belongs to the - even decades later - they still look culturally hunter-gatherer tradition. All Australian rock art towards motherlands. Each night, the jet flights does, for Aboriginal Australians - in contrast with leave South Africa for Europe, seven non-stop Papua New Guinea, with its gardening and pig and direct to London alone, but eastwards farming - maintained their hunter-gatherer life towards Australia, some nights just two, some styles until their land was overwhelmed by British nights not one. The rock art and archaeology of settlement from 1788 onwards. these two great southern lands have so much in common; yet the only recent - perhaps the only ever - field collab oration has been that beginning a de cade ago between Sven Ouzman (then of the National Museum in Bloem fontein) and Paul Tagon (then of the Australian Museum in Sydney). Based in Britain, I myself do field studies in Aus tralia and teach annually at Wits in Johannesburg, and perhaps begin now to know sufficient about southern Afri can rock art to hazard a few words of comparative comment. Geographically, these two zones have Fig 1: European figures of the Australian Contact Period in much in common: southern land blocks characteristic stance: feet turned out, clothing with distinctive at much the same latitude, with archaic trousers and shirts, arms on hips or in pockets, pipes in mouth.