digital photograph(colour)
- Museum number
- 2013,2034.8628
- Description
-
Digital photograph (colour); view of stone cairn with stone slabas at the base. Several cliffs can be seen in the background. Chad.
Scanned
- Production date
-
November 1996 (original photograph)
-
25 May 2006 (date digitized)
- Dimensions
-
File size: 120 megabytes
-
Resolution: 300 dots per inch
- Curator's comments
- The cairn has a pre-islamic chronology. The photograph was taken between the Ennedi Plateau and the Tibesti Mountains. These two geographical features are placed to the north of Chad.
The Ennedi Plateau is located at the northern-east corner of Chad, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It is a sandstone massif carved by erosion in a series of superimposed terraces, alternating plains and ragged cliffs crossed by seasonal rivers (wadis). Unlike other areas in the Sahara with rock art engravings or paintings, the Ennedi Plateau receives rain regularly –if scarce- during the summer, and thus it is a more benign environment to human life that other areas placed to the north, as the Messak plateau, the Tassili or the Tibesti Mountains. These mountains are placed at the north-western corner of Chad, with a small part of them running into Libya. The central area of the Tibesti Mountains has a volcanic origin, with one third of the range covered by five volcanoes. That origin has formed vast plateaus as well as fumaroles, sulphur and natron deposits and other geologic formations. The erosion has shaped big canyons were seasonal rivers (wadis) flow irregularly.
Rock art was first discovered in the Tibesti Mountains, but research only started to be fully undertaken from the 50’s and 60’s thanks to the works of Gerard Bailloud and Paul Huard. The depictions in both areas can be broadly organized in the same periods and styles of the rest of Saharan rock art areas, although with chronologies more modern than those of the regions to the north. The great amount of cliffs, wadis and plateaus has led to an incredible variety of rock art styles throughout these two areas, with paintings being more numerous in the Ennedi Plateau while engravings seem to be predominant at the Tibesti Mountains.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2013
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- 2013,2034.8628
- Additional IDs
-
Previous owner/ex-collection number: CHANAS0422 (TARA number)