Cognition and Representation of Self and the Other in North African Rock Art

Project Information

CRESO

Grant agreement ID: 700778

DOI

10.3030/700778

Project closed

EC signature date 11 March 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 195 454,80

EU contribution

€ 195 454,80

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CRESO (Cognition and Representation of Self and the Other in North African Rock Art)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In North Africa, hundreds of rock art sites testify to the occupation of the so-called Green Sahara from 9500 to 3500 BC (Early and Mid-Holocene), when palaeoenvironmental conditions were favourable to human settlement. Rock art is largely dominated by animals and by humans performing activities: hunting, herding, house-keeping, confronting, dancing, celebrating and interacting. Extensive surveys were undertaken from the 1930s. As new technologies facilitate the recording and processing of data, in tandem studies of Saharan rock art need a renewed vigour to go beyond the classical stylistic and regional studies. CRESO project has been designed to investigate the potential of this rock art to tell us about human and cultural thought, systems of meanings and social dimensions. The wider research objective was to reach a better understanding of the emergence of individual and collective identities amongst Saharan populations. To sum up the importance of the project for society: it contributes to provide a better understanding of how social change happens, especially when groups are confronted to rapid environmental changes. The results show that the transition from hunting and gathering to pastoralist ways of life did not mean a transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian forms of society, as it has often been caricatured. The project thus brings a new light on social evolutions at this major transition in human history.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"The corpus is composed of hunter-gatherer and pastoralist material over the large and varied Saharan territory. The first part of the work has consisted in gathering the corpus of rock art images: rock art data already collected by Dr Honoré in the field in the Saharan massifs, from publications and 'grey literature'. All data on site context, description, chronology, and detailed and systematic description of the images have been included in a multi-entry relational database. One of the challenges has been to harmonise a motley collection of documentation. GIS analysis has been implemented to manage cross-analysis and exploit the different kinds of data according to their spatial dimension. A GIS platform has been created on ArcGIS software. Then, the GIS has been used to address targeted queries. Statistics were also applied in order to determine if regular patterns emerge. These tools were useful considering the size, complexity and dispersal of the dataset.
Substantial differences could be seen between the rock art of hunter-gatherers and the rock art of pastoralist groups. The most important results are:
- Group scenes are important in the rock art of both hunter-gatherer groups and pastoralist groups. But human groups are generally larger in hunter-gatherer rock art compared to pastoralist rock art.
- Hunter-gatherers did depict a larger range of activities compared to pastoralist groups. Pastoralists did depict mostly pastoral activities.
- In the pastoralist rock art, the animal figure (bovines mostly, but also caprines) is more important than the human figure.
- In the hunter-gatherer rock art, the expression of individual differences depends on the activity performed by the group more than on the size of the group.
- In the hunter-gatherer rock art, individualisation is the most expressed in scenes linked with domestic activities, and the least expressed in scenes linked with ritual, dance, music and the supernatural: the hypothesis can be made that this is because social cohesion is more important in these activities.
- The expression of equality or inequality is depending more on the social agenda of the group than on a ""global"" level of equality or inequality.
In general, the marked evolution from a small number of large rock art sites for hunter-gatherers to a large number of small rock art sites for pastoralists may also reflect a change in practices, or even an evolution of social structures.
Besides, time has been devoted to case studies focused on a small collection of rock art sites having provided important sets of images. For example, two book chapters ensuing from the project are based on the case study of WG52 (Wadi Sura II) rock art site, Gilf el-Kebir, Egypt, where I have myself done some fieldwork.
Exploitation and dissemination of these results was done through:
- The organisation of the international Paris-Cambridge seminar with 19 speakers
- The Evans-Pritchard lectures that I have delivered in Oxford, All Souls College, May 2018, mostly based on the results of CRESO project
- My teaching experience at the University of Cambridge and at the Université de Lyon, with lectures on rock art
- My involvement as a Research Associate at St John's College, Cambridge
- The congresses in my field to which I have taken part during the project: SAfA Toronto, UISPP Paris, PANAf Rabbat + the workshop ""dualisms in Prehistory"" in Rennes, France
- The other lectures or dissemination events to which I have taken part: MAE Nanterre, Postdoc forum Cambridge, McDonald Seminar Series
- Three interviews I have given to Live Science
- The publications I have achieved, most of which are due out in the forthcoming months: Editing a thematic issue of Quaternary International on Symbolic territories, 1 paper in Quaternary International, 1 chapter in the edited book Social inequality before farming, 1 chapter in the edited book Sharing: the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers, 1 book in preparation"

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

"Most progress brought by the CRESO project lie in its ground-breaking approach. There has never been an initiative in North African rock art studies to explore the images with anthropological questions about perception, identity and social representations. CRESO is the first attempt to investigate the intellectual dimension of the cultural systems in which Saharan rock art was produced. Yet, rock art is not a basic transcription of what life was, nor solely a spiritual expression. Images should be considered to have been built from the various experiences of the painters. Clear patterns have emerged from the large-scale study undertaken (see details in the previous section) and allow to formulate hypotheses on social evolution at this major time in human history: the transition from hunting and gathering ways of life to food production. To this regard, CRESO results have already gone much further than the expected results: they contribute to question big models that are generally accepted in archaeology and anthropology. In the meantime, the project has been the occasion to develop a new kind of approach at the crossroads of Archaeology, Anthropology and other disciplines: ""Palaeosociology"". Due to the importance of such revolution in our ways to perceive social change in Prehistory, I have undertaken the writing of a book to expose these results. The benefit of the project can finally be seen in the exchanges it has created: exchanges amongst the rock art research community, and exchanges in the prehistoric archaeology research community (fostered by the Paris-Cambridge exchange seminar). Further discussion are still ongoing and new collaborations at the European level (especially between Prehistorians from Cambridge and Prehistorians from Paris, two different schools of thought rather separated so far) can be expected. Having built up such links appear to be critical at the time of a probable Brexit that will undoubtedly affect the European research landscape."

Map of rock art concentrations in the Saharan massifs