Ricerc@Sapienza

Rock art sites of Tadrart Acacus represent an outstanding record of ancient human groups who lived in the central Saharan region during the Holocene, from the early hunting-gathering communities to the emergence of the first Pastoral society, to the development of the Garamantian state, until the Tuareg occupation. The subjects and scenes are painted and engraved on cliffs, isolated boulders or on the walls of rock-shelters, and in the rare deep caves. They mainly represent animals and humans, both isolated, in groups and performing daily or ritual activities.

Over the past decade, physical and chemical analyses have been widely applied to the study of rock art contexts, particularly to examine the composition of rock art paintings and for direct radiometric dating. Different sampling and analytical methods have been applied to rock art from different parts of the world. However, in Africa these analyses are still at an embryonic stage. The results are often problematic in terms of reliability, mainly as concerns the chronology.

The current volume includes a selection of the papers presented at this session, as well as some new invited papers by leading international researchers. These supplementary papers were added to achieve a more global representation and to complement some of the topics addressed in this volume.

Rock art is one of the most significant aspects of Saharan cultural heritage. The recent critical political developments determined the inaccessibility of many sites, raising the risk of destruction of the artworks, already significantly endangered by natural and anthropic threats. It is urgent to propose concrete actions to improve the understanding of this heritage and raise awareness of its extraordinary value, as a testimony of the past, as well as a resource for the future.

This paper focuses on southern Ethiopia, along the outer rim of the Rift Valley and not far from the Kenyan border, in an area forming part of a larger region known as a cradle of humankind. However, it also hosts a diverse Holocene rock art heritage, which is still underestimated and underdocumented. Paintings and engravings are widespread in the region, both in rock shelters and open-air sites, often located in remote areas currently inhabited by communities belonging to different ethnic groups.

The open rock shelter of Yabelo in Ethiopia hosts diverse Holocene paintings of great cultural importance. The paintings are characterized by the presence of different mineral coatings, whose features have not been studied yet. Our goal was to understand whether different rock samples from the Yabelo paintings collected in close proximity may reveal coatings with different minerology and biology. Thus, elemental analyses combined with microscopic and molecular investigations were performed on two coatings, one whitish (sample 1) and one reddish (sample 2).

The Pierres de Ben Barour, also known as trapping or tethering stones (TS), are stone artefacts
with notches or grooves usually interpreted as hunting devices on the basis of rock art
engravings. Though their presence is a peculiar feature of desert landscapes from the
Sahara to the Arabian Peninsula, we know little about their age, context and function. Here
we present a new approach to the study of these artefacts based on a large dataset (837
items) recorded in the Messak plateau (SW Libya). A statistically-based geoarchaeological

Book Review

First visited by westerners in the mid-nineteenth century, Saharan rock art has since received a great deal of attention. The richness and diversity of this region is recognised by the inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list of three properties: Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria, Tadrart Acacus in Libya, and Ennedi in Chad.

The chapter summarized the main climatic, environmental and archaeological phenomena of Holocene central Sahara.