This volume publishes part of the scientific contributions presented at the XX UISPP World Congress in Timișoara, combining studies on North African prehistoric art – both parietal and portable – with field investigation results. Emerging from the session organised by the Commission ‘Art and Civilizations of the Sahara during Prehistoric Times’, this book demonstrates how Saharan research offers a comprehensive representation of the society, environment, and intellectual world of past human groups. In doing so, it embraces the inspiration of the congress organisers, who established interdisciplinarity as the central theme of the event.
The volume opens with an overview of research on the rock art corpus, spanning from historical chronological classifications to studies focused on the meaning of the artworks. The crisis of these traditional approaches has given rise to the current trend, which focuses on digital recording and image-enhancement technologies to facilitate interpretation. Beyond parietal art, two chapters present valuable studies on the ornamentation of ostrich eggshells, an ancient tradition originating in the late Pleistocene and developing throughout the Holocene. The Capsian environment of the Eastern Maghreb forms the focus of these analyses, geographically centred between Tunisia and Algeria.
The illustration of excavations in two recently discovered, significant caves leads into the Sahara – specifically the Saharan Atlas and the Ahaggar region – presenting unpublished data from ongoing research. The volume concludes with a fascinating topic in Saharan protohistory: the ‘Chariot Peoples’ who introduced horse-drawn vehicles to the Sahara. The author demonstrates how the technical features of the Saharan harness replicate identical technological solutions used in Pharaonic Egypt.
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