Les images rupestres du Sahara central

• Main Authors: Frédérique Duquesnoy, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme 2019-05-01
• Series: Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie
• Subjects: rock images; Sahara; digital imaging; statistical and spatial analysis; cultural phylogenetics
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nda/5341

Although known for more than a century and a half, the cave paintings and engravings of the Sahara have not yet provided all the information they contain as witnesses to past societies, of which they are often the only remains. Indeed, on the one hand, the failure of any direct dating has led to the establishment of unsubstantiated chronological sequences ; on the other hand, favoured by this lack of a precise temporal framework, and based on outdated paradigms and methodologies, cultural interpretations of these artefacts, both ideal and material, have often proved to be sterile. However, since the 1990s, and at the initiative of Alfred Muzzolini, a current of thought has been working to restore the full archaeological status of these images, using methods that meet modern scientific requirements, both for establishing the documentation and studying it. Although the current context is not conducive to in situ research, these new approaches have led to significant progress in understanding these images.The emergence of digital imaging has thus generated a considerable contribution to the constitution of Saharan corpuses, by revealing very blurred pictures via image processing software, and then by facilitating the tracings and make them more reliable. In addition, computer databases now allow the permanent archiving of these documents as well as their portability to computer tools adapted to their study.On the basis of these more complete inventories, the use of multivariate statistical analyses made it possible to verifiably reproduce the stylistic classification of paintings and engravings, by deepening the concept of "style nuclei" proposed by Alfred Muzzolini. From the series so obtained, different types of archaeological information can then be studied, in particular by areology and phylomemetics, allowing a better characterization of the author groups.Another innovative aspect that we wish to promote, facilitated by the use of the Internet, is sharing data across geopolitical or institutional boundaries, so that research on these remains can be truly successful.