known habitation sites such as haua fteah (Cyrenaica), Amekni (Hoggar), Acacus, Tassili, and Grotte Capeletti (Aures).

The major problem that inspired all of these excavations was the elucidation of the origins of the Saharan Neolithic. The Capsian period, as Vaufrey envisaged it within his vast Neolithic Capsian tradition (a concept dismissed by L. Balout), was revised. C-14 dates showed that the Saharan Neolithic was much older than had been expected, with ceramics appearing as recently as the middle of the eighth millennium b.c. at El Adam (in the Egyptian Western Desert) and at Tagalagal. Domestic animals were known from the fifth millennium b.c. and perhaps earlier in the Egyptian Western Desert. The concept of a sui generis Saharan early Neolithic, called “Neolithique Saharo-Soudanais” by G. Camps and “Aqualithic” by J.E.G. Sutton, took shape. It was a Neolithic of the fairly wet phase at the beginning of the Holocene, and its ceramics included the wavy-line motif and rocking impressions. In this Neolithic (the word simply means “with pottery” for Francophones), domestic animals are considered later than pottery, contrary to evolution noted in the Middle East. Saharan proto-historic periods remain obscure. Ancient Libyan inscriptions, plentiful in the Sahara and more plentiful still in the Maghreb, remain undeciphered.

Other work, without neglecting the cultural aspects of the sites studied, has been aimed principally at formulating climatic and ecological reconstructions. In this domain German geographers have been particularly active, notably in Libya (W. Meckelein, B. Gabriel, H.-J. Pachur, H. Hagedorn, and so on), in Mauritania and northern Mali (N. Petit-Maire), and on the fluctuations of the Holocene Paleo-Chad (H. Faure and J. Maley).

As for rock art, at last the Tassilian paintings have come to the forefront. After his earlier discovery of the Oued Djerat, the explorer Brenans traveled through the Tassilian plateau and filled his notebooks with drawings of this art. These notebooks eventually ended up in the possession of Breuil and Lhote and were presented at the Geological Conference of Algiers in 1952, in the form of two separate and different communications by Lhote and Abbe Breuil.

Henri Lhote undertook important rock-art expeditions between 1956 and 1959. With a team of painters, he made detailed color copies of this art, which were exhibited in Paris in 1959. Since then Lhote has been recognized as the best connoisseur of the rock art of the Tassili, the Hoggar, and the Saharan Atlas and also, more recently, of that from the Air Mountains. Before his death in 1991 he published a considerable amount of material on the subject. Two books (Lhote 1973, 1976) notably popularized the “frescoes of the Tassili” and contributed enormously to the popularization of Saharan cultural tourism. Another discoverer and important author is Gal P. Huard, whose publications have made known sites in Nubia and the Tibesti. The rock art of the Acacus, which differ very little from those of Tassilian, were recorded in the same way by F. Mori, who published them in 1965 in a handsome album.

Until recently studies on Saharan rock art have remained largely in a descriptive phase, through inventories, classifications of schools, and the positioning of these schools in first a relative and then an absolute chronology. Controversies persist about the emic reality of these schools, which are essentially defined according to the criterion of style and chronology. Supporters of a “short” chronology entirely within the Neolithic (the position of the present writer, who claims that the totality of Saharan rock art cannot go back beyond about 4000 b.c.) remain opposed to those who support a “long” chronology. For instance, F. Mori continues to argue for an Upper Pleistocene age for early Saharan rock art. The present writer has also challenged the traditional Monod-Lhote sequence, claiming the so-called Bubaline period to be of Bovidian age.

Problems of interpretation have not been resolved. In 1966 a learned Fulah, Hampate Ba, and an ethnologist, G. Dieterlen, argued that some Tassilian frescoes were the result of the myths of present-day Fulani people, without establishing the reality of this transmission through time. Since then many researchers have expressed enthusiastic views about this exciting interpretation.