Research Items

Abstract

Rock Art in North Africa. M. RAYMOND VAUFREY has now added to his previous reports on the results of his researches on the rock art sites of southern Oran and their bearing on the origin, affinities and chronology of the north African neolithic, further details of tho sites, comparative studies, and full illustration (Arch, de l'Instit. de Pal. Humaine, Mém. 20; 1939). On four groups of sites, in the mountains of Figuig, Ksour, Géryville and Jebel Amour, the association of a stone industry with these rock-engravings of animal and human figures, an association previously undetected, made it possible to assign this art to a neolithic with Capsian traditions, which is shown to extend to northern Oran and beyond, linking up with the neolithic of the Sahara and a neolithic pluvial period, to which a date is assigned ranging from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the second millennium before our era. In order to test the application of this dating to the North African neolithic with Capsian tradition and the associated rock art of Oran, the comparison, obvious on both geographical and cultural grounds, is made with proto-historie and pre-dynastic Egypt. Here it is found that certain cultural elements in the North African neolithic are to be assigned to the various cultural stages or ‘civilizations’ now distinguished—Tasian, Badarian, Amratian, Gerzean —dating from at most 6000 B.C. to about 2000 B.C. But whereas these cultural elements or traits appear at various stages in Egypt according to the ‘civilization’ to which they belong, in North Africa they appear together—a fact which is explicable only on the ground that the North African is ‘colonial’ in character in relation to Egypt. A possible affinity of certain rock engravings showing a chariot with galloping horses fixes the latest dating at the opening of the Eighteenth Dynasty, 1580 B.C. As regards its racial character, tho culture in Oran is linked with the race of Mechta el-Arbi, which has been shown to have Cro-Magnon affinities.