African Rock Art

A brief summary is presented of the different theories that have been advanced to explain the Canarian geometric rock art, which has been found mostly in La Palma Island. Later a review is made of the cases, ethnographically recorded in Africa, with an association between the same type of art and rain-making ceremonies. A special case is summarized, which was recorded
recently by the author in West Ethiopia, where prehistoric schematic red paintings are used together with Islamic rituals to pray for rain. The repeated connection between rock
art and rain-making in many parts of Africa strengthens the old theory that the greatest part of Canarian prehispanic rock art could have had the same function.

Huyge D. 2018: The 'Headless Women' of Qurta (Upper Egypt): The Earliest Anthropomorphic Images in Northern-African Rock Art, in Huyge D. & Van Noten F. (Guest Eds.): What Ever Happened to the People? Humans and Anthropomorphs in the Rock Art of Northern Africa, Brussels: Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences & Royal Museums of Art and History, 419-430.
Summary. - The earliest anthropomorphic representations in Northern-African rock art belong to the late Pleistocene Late Palaeolithic period (ca. 17,000-15,000 cal BCE). They have so far only been found in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley (with some possibly contemporaneous examples in the north-central part of the Sinai Peninsula). Several of these figures bear a remarkable similarity to the anthropomorphs of the Gönnersdorf (or Gönnersdorf-Lalinde) type, the so-called ‘headless women’, well known from the substantially later Late Magdalenian cultural phase of Palaeolithic Europe (ca. 13,500-11,000 cal BCE). The current contribution describes these earliest Northern-African anthropomorphic images in some detail and attempts to interpret them in a wider geographical and cultural context.

The EAST AFRICA and HORN OF AFRICA Rock Art Bibliography is extracted from the Rock Art Studies Bibliographic Database version r31 and contains 228 citations covering the countries of: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Djibuti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.

The present publication is concerned with the rock art from two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia surveyed in the scope of the UNESCO-organised salvage campaign by the Czechoslovak Institute of Egyptology (Charles University in Prague). It has two main objects, first to complete the catalogue of the rock art documented or localised in the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession with hitherto unpublished rock-art surfaces and occurrences (both petroglyphs and rock paintings) and, second, to provide a critical revision of the data published in Katalog der Felsbilder aus der Tschechoslowakischen Konzession in Nubien (edited by F. Váhala and P. Červíček, Prag 1999). With a view to presenting the results of the critical revision, made on the basis of the field documentation gathered by the Czechoslovak expedition and deposited in the archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague), all rock-art data – both unpublished and published – are arranged in the present volume in a tabular form. Tables 1–4 containing the description and revision of the rock-art data from the two sections of the Czechoslovak concession in a succession from north to south and, as distinct from Katalog, separately for each bank of the Nile, are accompanied by introductory notes on the formation of the corpus, hitherto unpublished distribution maps of the completed and revised corpus, 155 hitherto unpublished black-and-white photographs, and four colour plates with the sheets of the colour scale used for the recording of patina difference or colour value of preserved paints. With the two objects accomplished, the present publication constitutes a kind of manual to the rock-art corpus from the Czechoslovak concession in Lower Nubia and is to be regarded, together with Katalog, as the complete and authoritative source of data for evaluation of the significance of the evidence from the two sections of the Nile Valley in Lower Nubia.

The Tswalu Reserve in the southern Kalahari is an arid place, the present occupation of which is only made possible by means of boreholes that tap patches of fossil water, while semi-permanent surface sources of ~65 m2 extent are confined to three localities within an investigated area of over 1000 km2. Lithic evidence indicates that this vicinity was abandoned by humans during even drier Ice Age intervals, when rainfall fell at times to ~40% of present values, thereby providing a way to refer petroglyphs there to interglacials of known age and intensity in terms of regional and global paleaoclimatic data. By such means, together with microerosion measurements, it then becomes possible to identify three regional cupule production intervals: the earliest with cupules only at ~410–400 ka bp, the next with cupules and outline circles at ~130–115 ka ago, and the most recent, with cupules, geometric motifs and iconic images, at ~8–2 ka bp.

uMhwabane Shelter (also known as eBusingatha Shelter) is a rock art site in the amaZizi Traditional Authority Area. It is one of KwaZulu-Natal's problem rock art sites. Today it still contains at least 50 hunter-gatherer paintings but there used to be many more. As with other easily accessible rock art sites that have no access control, the art has suffered from vandalism. Authorities responded by removing some 31 painted rocks at the time of the visit of the British royal family to South Africa in 1947. The institutions entrusted with their care subsequently neglected the art. Action is now being taken to conserve and display the removed rock art. In this paper we piece together oral traditions, documents and images to tell the history of an extreme case of archaeological intervention, its consequences and future prospects.

South Africa is unique in the contemporary world in that it uses indigenous rock art images in its major national symbols. For example, rock art appears at the heart of the national coat of arms (see below) and on all banknotes (Figure 7.1a). One can judge whether a banknote is genuine by folding it and seeing whether the rock art lines up to create a coherent rock art panel. And, one can spend these banknotes at a highway service station on a take-out burger that comes in a rock-art-themed carton with rock-art-themed condiments (Figure 7.1b). Or, one can get directions to a South African casino toilet by following rock-art-themed signage. One can also go to one of many tourist markets and find artists of European descent making a living out of selling artistic reproductions of South African rock art in the form of watercolors, jewelry, tea towels, T-shirts, candles, painted stones, and so on. Some of these uses of rock art are empowering, appropriate, and sensitive; others are crass, unethical, and overtly racist. This chapter explores the use of rock art in South Africa within its historical context since 1900.

The monograph is the first exhaustive publication of nine shelters with rock paintings documented by the Czechoslovak expedition in Lower Nubia in the scope of the UNESCO-organised salvage campaign. The presentation of each of the painted shelters includes description of the landscape setting and physical characteristics of the rock surfaces, analyses of the thematic, stylistic, syntactic, and technical aspects of the rock art, discussion of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the rock-art surface, and evaluation of the significance of the evidence. The final chapter offers some thoughts on the overall significance of the rock paintings from the Czechoslovak concession as one of the artistic and cultural expressions of the populations that inhabited Lower Nubia in different periods of the past and as historical documents about their past worlds and lives. The text is accompanied by 3 maps, 26 b/w photographs, 33 colour photographs, and 2 archival documents. Part of the book is a separate large-format (70 × 100 cm) two-sided plate with a colour reconstruction of one of the most exquisite painted rock surfaces in Lower Nubia, the so-called “Painted Shelter at Korosko” (field number 17 R XIII A) on the face side and with thematic, stylistic, syntactic, metrical, and technical data of the motifs complemented with information on the preservation of the colour values of paints and superimpositions on the other side.

In this paper, the framework of scales proposed by Ch. Chippindale (2004) for the reporting and study of rock art as pictures in place is used for the presentation of the "Painted Shelter at Korosko" - one of the most exceptional rock-art surfaces from Lower Nubia - that, since the 1960s, is accessible for research only through "pictures of the pictures in place" and "pictures out of place". Each one of the four, closely inter-connected scales (from millimetre to kilometre) is used to discuss the technical, thematic, stylistic, syntactic, and locational and archaeological aspects of this rock-art occurrence that finds no parallels in the rock art of Lower Nubia. Despite the limitations of the sources available for the reconstruction of the transformation of the natural rock surface in the shelter into the multi-layered rock-art surface that was eventually documented by the Czechoslovak expedition in the framework of the UNESCO salvage campaign, it is possible to build up an evaluation of the significance of the evidence and to raise a number of important issues, including (but not limited to) those concerning the (ethnic) identity, (social) dynamics, and possible function of rock art for Nubian communities during the Middle Nubian sequence (C-Group times). The paper is dedicated to the memory of Ján Midžiak (1932-2013), member of two Czechoslovak epigraphic expeditions to Lower Nubia (1963, 1964).

Flywhisks are a common motif in southern African rock art, both in paintings and engravings. This brief article gathers most of the data on flywhisks in the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of /xam San (Bushman) ethnography and suggests connections between certain /xam narratives featuring segis (elephant shrews) and a panel featuring sengis and human figures with flywhisks in Springbokoog's main site.

The 2009 campaign in Agdal of Oukaïmeden has centred
on different lines of work: the excavation of the Elefant's
Shelter or Adbasan, the survey made in Aguni Nait Warij,
the excavations made in the tombs of the Oukaimed valley
and the surveying in front of the K-4.14 station "Elephant's
Frieze". All these interventions have allowed for, among
other discoveries, determining chronologies. On the other
hand, the campaign has focused on the execution of different
analyses of pollen, showing a total of 10 profiles and
moss samples of the most significant enclaves were also
taken.
Other lines of investigation in 2009 have been directed at
the processes of deterioration of the cave wall etchings, proposing
recommendations of actuation in response, and to
the intensification of the general study of cavewall art in the
area, which has led to new discoveries. The campaign has
concluded with the ethno-archeological work developed in
contact with the pastors of the Atlas.

South African rock art provides a window into the Bushman worldview. For a better understanding of Bushman history and beliefs and the conservation of rock art sites, a better knowledge of the materials making up the paints, the mineral accretions and their alterations is required. A conjunction of imaging techniques (optical microscopy, SEM–EDX, Raman spectromicroscopy and synchrotron FT–IR) allowed us to describe the complex layered fabric that evidences a history of accretion, painting and alteration in eight samples of painted rock. Two types of paints are identified and the distribution of calcium oxalates is discussed in terms of conservation and dating potential.

The Mousgou Settlement Complex is a large group of prehistoric human habitation sites that are dispersed northward from the northern and western slopes of the Ehi Mousgou mountain in northwestern Chad. The habitation sites consist of small round huts and irregularly-shaped enclosures, which probably served as livestock corrals. The presence of many hundreds of livestock enclosures suggests an origin for the Mousgou Settlement Complex during the Pastoral Period in the Sahara, dating from about 4500 to 3000 BCE.  There are a few tire-track paths into the Mousgou Settlement Complex, but there have been no reports of an on-site archaeological investigation of the area. Using Google Earth, the author of this paper has mapped the habitation sites of the Mousgou Settlement Complex.

Realization that rock art around the globe has a strong association to the religious and spiritual life of people has prompted an important transformation about the prevalent misconceptions that past societies were simplistic. This recognition allows an approach to rock art from an anthropological perspective and also frames our questions with the full understanding that, no matter the reasons why various populations had the impulse to create rock art, such material culture was embedded in a completely different knowledge system from ours. Following the line of discussion presented in this book, this chapter focuses on a rock art tradition that based on archaeological evidence and oral tradition was still in use until the middle of the last century, thus making it fairly recent. Its strong association to the Cheŵa matrilineal society of south-central Africa allows a rich analysis for its possible interpretation and function. Even though rock art no longer plays a part in Cheŵa ritual life, strong evidence suggests that it had a crucial role in the past in one of their most important ceremonies: Chinamwali, the girls’ initiation. The ceremony can be as ancient as the arrival of matrilineal groups, the ancestors of the Cheŵa, in the central Malawi region, ca. eighth A.D. but it is uncertain whether these people introduced initiation ceremonies. Chinamwali ceremonies have been recorded, however, since the end of the nineteenth century, and oral tradition attests that these have been part of Cheŵa society for many centuries before that. Chinamwali is still an event of great importance in many villages. No doubt Chinamwali has followed its own development and is likely to have changed to meet up with the political and economical circumstances, thus this work acknowledges its continuing process. However, I posit that the core of the teachings given through the ceremony have remained focused on certain main issues. In such ceremonies a girl is prepared for her adult life so that she can become an important member of the economic, social, and spiritual part of her family, the village, and the Cheŵa community as a whole. It is through this understanding that I suggest that the specific set of white rock paintings that I discuss throughout this paper, is connected to the religious notions of the Cheŵa people. Religious beliefs are reflected in the way the Cheŵa perceive and make use of the landscape for their rituals, and particularly in this case, I argue that rock art was involved in such a connection.

In the Libyan Desert, Wadi Sūra II shelter hosts numerous stencil paintings believed to date to the Early and Mid-Holocene. Tiny hands have previously been considered to belong to human babies. We challenge this identification , having conducted a morphometric study to compare the archaeological material with samples of hands of babies born at term and pre-term at the neonatal unit of the CHRU Jeanne de Flandre (Lille, France). The results show that the rock art small hands differ significantly in size, proportions and morphology from human hands. Potential biases between the different samples were quantified, but their average range cannot explain the observed differences. Evidence suggest that the hand stencils belong to an animal, most probably a reptile. The identification of non-human pentadactyl hand stencils is unique in the field of rock art and raises new perspectives for understanding the rock art at Wadi Sūra, and the behaviour and symbolic universe of the populations who made it.

Two famous rupestrian sculptures of felines, one found near Kombolcha (the “lion” of Kombolcha) and the other one close to Aksum (the "lionness” of Gobedra), have been known for long. These two monuments are here described in depth, allowing detailing their morphological, technological and taphonomical features. The lion of Kombolcha, having non-realistic traits, takes part within the variability of a mythological leonine figure represented in the ancient Near and Middle-East. As for the "lionness" of Gobedra, it appears as a leopard. In addition, the description of these monuments allows supporting (on the contrary of previous suggestions) the likely association of these figures with those of a cross and to suggest their chronological attribution to the Aksumite period during the earliest times of Christian influence. Keywords: lion, leopard, feline, rock art, Aksum, paleochristianity.

El yacimiento de Tiggane fue documentado en el 2013, en la segunda
campaña del proyecto “Prospección y documentación de yacimientos con arte
rupestre en el Valle de Tamanart (provincia de Tata, región de Guelmim-Ess Smara,
Marruecos)” desarrollado por la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia y la
Direction du Patrimoine Culturel del Reino de Marruecos. Dicho proyecto fue financiado
por la Subdirección General del Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España
del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, dentro de la convocatoria de Ayudas
en régimen de concurrencia competitiva para proyectos arqueológicos en el
exterior correspondientes al año 2012.
Con este artículo se pretende mostrar el método de documentación y análisis de
campo llevado a cabo en este tipo de yacimientos arqueológicos tan concretos, formados
por bloques de piedra exentos y cuya técnica figurativa es el grabado en sus
distintas modalidades.

Little remains known about the physical size of local sheep from southern Africa during
the distant past. Early Venda speakers settled in the region during the middle of
the second millennium AD, and an early site associated with them, Mutokolwe B,
yielded 11 complete metapodia of sheep. This is the largest find of this nature in the
southern African region for farming communities. The fauna from Mutokolwe B dates
to between AD 1450 and 1550. Measurements of archeological sheep bones can
help tease apart questions of breed development and socio-economic organization in
the past. We used these metapodials to calculate the shoulder height of sheep. Sheep
from Mutokolwe B ranged between 61.69 and 71.17 cm in shoulder size (average
66.28 cm), which is similar to other local sheep breeds such as the Nguni found in
South Africa. In addition, the size of the sheep from Mutokolwe B falls within the variation
of modern sheep found in southern and Eastern Africa.

IntroductionCupules are manmade, roughly semi-hemispherical depressions, not normally more than -8 cm in diameter, that were produced on hard rock surfaces by hammerstone percussion (Kumar and Krishna 2014), reportedly supplemented or replaced on softer stones by varying combinations of abrasion and incision (e.g. Clark 1958; Van Peer et al. 2003). The first account of their presence in sub-Saharan Africa occurs in A. A. Anderson's (1888) description of an isolated massive rock seen in 1867 near the confluence of the Notwane and Limpopo Rivers, the many petroglyphs on which included 'a small hollow of cup shape with two circles of the same round the centre one ...'. Since then, Africa south and east of the Sahara has produced many more cupule occurrences that a literature survey shows to be widely, but unevenly, distributed over its more than 18 million km2 extent, based on cited data for the localities listed in Appendix 1.Of these sites, only three have provided minimu...

Two famous rupestrian sculptures of felines, one found near Kombolcha (the “lion” of Kombolcha) and the other one close to Aksum (the "lionness” of Gobedra), have been known for long. These two monuments are here described in depth, allowing detailing their morphological, technological and taphonomical features. The lion of Kombolcha, having non-realistic traits, takes part within the variability of a mythological leonine figure represented in the ancient Near and Middle-East. As for the "lionness" of Gobedra, it appears as a leopard. In addition, the description of these monuments allows supporting (on the contrary of previous suggestions) the likely association of these figures with those of a cross and to suggest their chronological attribution to the Aksumite period during the earliest times of Christian influence. Keywords: lion, leopard, feline, rock art, Aksum, paleochristianity.

The 2010 field campaign's main targets were to complete the information gathered in the previous campaigns relative to the human settlement on the valley and to try and connect it with the rock art of the area. We are also dealing with the landscape reconstruction in order to analyse visibility and visibilization relations among rock art sites as well as to understand the
pattern of human settlement, obviously seasonal due the valley altitude –2.630 a/sl– and the human impact on the landscape. Finally we show some of the archaeological results achieved, as well as other on pollen, anthracology, GIS and radiocarbon data.

In 2005, members of the UCSB mission to Tumbos, Sudan, paid a visit to the great rock art site at Sabu, almost at the northern end of the Third Cataract. The visit was informal, and the photographs I (Bruce Williams) took were basically note-taking snapshots. Since then, however, the area has come under threat from proposed dams and no formal studies of this extremely important site have been published.

Supervised by: Prof. Mgr. Miroslav Bárta, Dr.
Submitted for review in: October 2014
Reviewed by: Dr. Dirk Huyge (Curator of Prehistoric and Early Dynastic Egypt, Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium)
Prof. PhDr. Břetislav Vachala, CSc. (Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague)
Defended in front of a commission on: 13 April 2015