By Savino di Lernia

My first trip to the Sahara was thirty years ago –no smartphones, poor and imprecise GPS coverage, and no satellite connections. I travelled from Rome by ferry to Tunis, and then to Tripoli until Ghat and the Tadrart Acacus Mountains in the south-western corner of Libya, at the very core of the Sahara. Although the era of the first pioneering explorers had already passed away, fieldwork in the central Sahara still was a technical and human challenge – it was completely analogue.

This desert region features a magnificent and diversified landscape, made of sandstone mountains, vast field of sand dunes, and endless gravel plains. Together with the Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria and the Ennedi in Chad, the Acacus Mountains are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List for their outstanding natural and/or cultural value.

North Africa and main centres of rock art (grey areas).

Rock art is a major element of this outstanding cultural heritage: countless engravings, graffiti and paintings – mostly of prehistoric age – dot the stony walls and rock shelters, creating a fascinating and enigmatic landscape.

Without first-hand experience, it is hard to appreciate the richness and diversity of Saharan rock art. Although the entire Africa continent is home of an extraordinary rock art, whose roots date back to the Pleistocene, there is no doubt that the central Sahara shows extraordinary characteristics. The combination of particular geomorphological features and low human impact is one of the reasons of their preservation, despite harsh climatic conditions largely prevailing since the late Holocene, from ca. 5900 years ago onwards. The large mountains systems of the central Sahara also acted as refuges during the environmental crises that repeatedly hit the Sahara over the last 130,000 years, and particularly during the onset of the Holocene, ca. 12,500 years.

Rock art of central Sahara entirely belongs to the Holocene, with different artistic expressions that have been related to hunter-gatherers, cattle herders, and camel caravaneers respectively– all of them deeply linked to the landscape.

Running giraffes on a sandstone cliff: the link between art and landscape is a constant of Saharan rock art (Rahrmellen, Tadrart Acacus. Photo courtesy FIlipp Gallino; © Sapienza University of Rome).

Artworks are located in caves, rock shelters, niches, cliffs, and on isolated boulders. It is difficult to estimates numbers, but ‘sites’ (a very difficult concept to apply to open air contexts, much easier with regard to caves and delimited rock shelters) are in the hundreds of thousands.

The two main categories of execution are pictographs and petroglyphs, with several internal variations. Both portray zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and abstract figures. Representations of cattle, the heart of Neolithic pastoral cultures, are iconic.

Cattle is the most iconic subjects of Saharan rock art (Imha, Tadrart Acacus. Photo courtesy Roberto Ceccacci; © Sapienza University of Rome).

Pictographs, or paintings, use local minerals and earths to obtain a vast array of colours, such as red, orange, pink, and green. Organic binders (mostly casein, but also blood and urine) and water were mixed with mineral pigments to create the pain. Despite these very basic production techniques, these paintings survived millennia because of their capacity to penetrate in the rock and create a sub-millimeter thick film. Petroglyphs vary from engravings (in some case grooves are carved up to 3 cm in the rock) to tiny, almost invisible, scratches.

In both techniques, dimensions vary strongly: from depictions of a few centimetres to actual size representation of elephants.

Elephant carved on an isolated large sandstone boulder (Bedis, Messak Settafet, © Sapienza University of Rome).

Begun by early Holocene hunter-gatherer-fishers more than 10,000 years ago, and mirroring the main historical and cultural variations across the Holocene, rock art is occasionally produced today by the few people that still inhabit the region, such as the kel Tadrart of the Acacus. Artworks mostly portray 4×4 pick-ups, Kalashnikov-like rifles, but also more complex panels that in a way imitate their prehistoric ancestors.

Present-day rock art from the Acacus (Northern Tadrart Acacus. Photo courtesy Sara Giovannetti; © Sapienza University of Rome).

Before the Arab Spring (2011), the main threats to rock art were mostly environmental factors, such as wind erosion, thermoclastism (microcracking caused by wide temperature fluctuations), and occasional rainfall. Human damage includes vandalism, infrastructure, oil and other resource exploitation, mass tourism, and the like. After 2011, we have seen, at least in Libya, the birth of deliberate vandalism, similar to other forms of cultural cleansing well known in the Middle East. Moreover, after the Arab Spring, large parts of North Africa and most of the Sahara have become inaccessible due to security constraints. Field research – both national and international – is very limited, and tourism is virtually absent. From Morocco to Egypt, the areas considered ‘safe’ are limited to towns and their immediate surroundings.

The vast expanses of the desert and the porous borders between, for example, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Chad make the central Sahara a particularly fragile region, where scientific research is practically non-existent. African researchers of various institutions also face many difficulties accessing these areas, whose state of preservation has never been assessed after 2011, except for very short reports. This applies in particular to southern Libya, whereas the situation in Algeria and Chad appears to be more positive.

A possible way to mitigate the difficulty of access and to restart research is based on digital data. Since the 1950s, many expeditions to the Sahara extensively recorded rock art panels, and there are huge archives of analogue photography hosted in several countries, particularly in Europe. Digital recording by means of camera, but also smartphones and drones, has been increasingly used over the last 20 years, creating another immense archive whose potential is still to be fully explored. Different institutions – such as the Rock Art Research Institute at Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the Trust African for Rock Art, Nairobi, or the British Museum, London – are posting on their websites vast photographic archives.

Home page of the African Rock Image Project At the British Museum. (https://africanrockart.britishmuseum.org, accessed on January 15 2019)

Despite some limitations – most of the websites are in English and offer poor archaeological and environmental background – these archives are an immense treasure to explore and search. Their dissemination on an open access basis can facilitate the “discovery” of rock art by school-age children across Africa and contribute to the necessary awareness of this crucial part of their own cultural heritage.

However, further efforts are necessary to make this experience more immersive and more attractive to non-professionals. The use of social networks and the design of databases adapted for smartphone use are fundamental next steps. The three-dimensional rendering of selected rock art sites making them accessible using virtual reality and enhanced reality devices could attract a new audience. Although the Internet is a major resource in Africa as elsewhere, a dramatically digital divide still remains. Broadband communication based is underdeveloped and fast mobile connections are present only in a few countries. This picture will probably change soon (with the spread of 4G and 5G). Rock art experts, as well as cultural institutions, universities and stakeholders should not be unprepared. The shift from analogue to digital in post Arab Spring countries has a particular social and scientific value: to keep alive and visible the study of rock art and to engage local institutions as well as local communities in its dissemination and survival.

Savino di Lernia is a faculty member at the Sapienza University of Rome and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.