ABSTRACT
The Sahara Desert has long been one of the most desolate parts of the world but many places within it have abundant archaeological evidence that this was not always so. Between about 11,000 and 4500 years ago, cooler and moister conditions than at present enabled groups of people to live in areas that now have few if any inhabitants (Chapter 7). Both their living sites and their burials are testimony to their presence and, most importantly, they left us pictures of the world in which they lived and of their part in it. These consist of both engravings and paintings that have been found on most of the substantial exposures of rock in the desert and which number in the tens of thousands. Most of them depict animals but people are also represented, as well as scenes from everyday life. Like the southern African rock art (Chapter 5), they are difficult to date but, unlike that art, they were probably mainly the work of early food-producers such as herdsmen, rather than of hunter-gatherers. Also unlike the southern examples, the practice of art in the Saharan region virtually faded away after 2000 years ago, making its interpretation even more difficult. Nevertheless, the rock art of the Sahara has been extensively studied for many years by a large number of scholars. In spite of the problems that make it difficult to understand, the art yields information about life in the region before environmental change brought about abandonment by most of its occupants.
