Tombs, Etruscan
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Tadrart Acacus Rock Art Sites
Definition
Marina Gallinaro Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichita`, Sapienza Universita` di Roma, Rome, Italy
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 (Mori 1965; Barich 1987; Muzzolini 1995; Cremaschi & di Lernia 1998; Le Quellec 1998; Liverani 2005), until the Tuareg occupation (Biagetti & Chalcraft 2012). The subjects and scenes are painted and engraved on cliffs, isolated boulders or on the walls of rockshelters, and in the rare deep caves. They mainly represent animals and humans, both isolated, in groups and performing daily or ritual activities. Set into the wider archaeological and paleoclimatic framework, rock art adds important elements to the reconstruction of the environmental, sociocultural, and ideological dynamics of the past cultures.
Introduction The Tadrart Acacus is a sandstone massif range located in the southwestern side of Libya, in the core of the Sahara, close to the Algerian border. The area is today a harsh and dry landscape, inhabited by a few Tuareg families, but it has not always been a desert. During the humid climatic fluctuations occurring particularly in the Holocene, the area was greener and suited for animal and human life. Evidence of the ancient occupations is spread all over the massif and the neighboring areas in the form of open-air sites (isolated finds, scatters of artifacts, or megalithic structures) as well as stratified archaeological deposits preserved in rockshelters and caves. It is in these same contexts that one of the richest concentrations of Saharan rock art is hosted. In 1985, the rock art sites of Tadrart Acacus were inserted in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites as an example of “a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared” (Criterion III: http://whc.unesco. org/en/criteria/).
Key Issues/Current Debates/Future Directions/Examples Discovery and Outline of Research The presence of rock art evidence from the Sahara was first reported by European militaries and travellers crossing the region since the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.
C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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Anyway, until recent times, the Tadrart Acacus massif was almost unknown to the international community. In 1894, F. Foureau reported the first notice about the presence of engravings in the area; in 1926, the Abbe´ Breuil and his collaborators published the site of In Ezzan, located southeast of Ghat, and about two decades later Paolo Graziosi worked in the southern areas of Selfufet, In Arrechin, and Tachisset (all sites today in the Algerian Tadrart – Graziosi 1942). In 1955, Fabrizio Mori crossed the western c
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