The theft of Saharan rock-art

Extract

'The Greatest Museum of Prehistoric Art in the whole World'. Such was the description Henri Lhote gave to the rock paintings of the Tassili-n- Ajjer , the massif (a designated World Heritage Site) that lies to the northeast of Ahaggar in the Algerian Central Sahara. His expedition spent 16 months in the Tassili in 1956-7 making 'discovery after discovery' and copying 'hundreds upon hundreds of painted walls'. Lhote's work is now recognized for its denigration of almost all and sundry. He likened the local people, the Tuareg, who made many of his 'discoveries', to wolves and living by the laws of the jungle. Significantly, he made no reference in his 'discovery claims' to Yolande Tschudi, the Swiss ethnologist, whose work preceded his own. Worse still, he undertook what might be regarded today as the systematic vandalism of the sites, not only by liberally washing the paintings to restore their colour, but by collecting and removing copious quantities of material artefacts from the area.