Search the Article Database:

Search our library of articles, papers and other published materials. You can use keywords or boolean-style search:

People, Plants, Animals, and Formlings in the Rock Art of Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe, the term “rock art” refers mainly to prehistoric engravings and paintings that were executed on the walls of shallow caves, rock shelters, or faces of boulders across the country. Rock paintings were executed using pigments in a variety of colors and textures while engravings were etched into the rock using incisions, polishing, or pecking methods. The paintings dominate the corpus of rock art in the country. They are found within the granitic boulders that cover much of the

View Details + Download

Animal Hill – a Large Prehistoric Rock Art Site CO178 in the Central Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt

This article introduces one of the largest rock art sites found in the central Dakhleh Oasis. Firstly, an overview of all the panels with petroglyphs is provided and the images briefly described. The panels’ description contains basic information on their location and visibility, motifs and their compositional aspects, and chronology. This is followed by a brief summary of the presented data and a discussion situating the site in the broader context of Dakhleh and the surrounding Western Desert. Particular motifs

View Details + Download

Camouflaged chameleons: a new discovery at the Egyptian site of el-Hosh

Representations of reptiles are relatively rare in Egyptian rock art. Here, we present a petroglyph found at the site of elHosh that closely resembles a chameleon, a morphologically distinct type of lizard. In evaluating the image, we provide a comprehensive review of the limited evidence for chameleons in other Egyptian graphical depictions and texts, revealing previously unrecognised examples found in New Kingdom tomb decorations. We conclude that the el-Hosh creature was likely executed during the Dynastic period or later, and

View Details + Download

Archaeological Ochres of the Rock Art Site of Leopard Cave (Erongo, Namibia): Looking for Later Stone Age Sociocultural Behaviors

The use of ochre has been documented in many Middle Stone Age sites of Southern Africa. However, the literature on the exploitation of ochre within the archaeological contexts of Later Stone Age (LSA) rock art sites is scarce. Despite the discovery of several painted shelters within the Erongo Mountains (Namibia), no archaeological study of ochre assemblages has been conducted in the region. Here, we present the archaeological ochre assemblage recovered from a LSA sequence at the rock art shelter of

View Details + Download