African Rock Art

 
Trust for African Rock Art
 
 
The Mission:
 
To create greater global awareness of the importance and endangered state of African rock art; survey sites; monitor status; be an information resource and archive; and promotes and support rock art conservation measures.
 
TARA is the world's only organisation dedicated to this cultural imperative, and as such it has received support and recognition from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Geographic Society, among others. TARA's singular contributions have also been widely acclaimed in the scientific and popular media including National Geographic, Time, Natural History, People and the London Times.
 
African Rock Art is amongst the world's oldest surviving art, predating writing by tens of thousands of years. Today, it helps us understand how our ancestors thought, saw and portrayed their world. Some rock paintings and engravings are themselves magnificent art, comparable to some of the finest works found in the World's art galleries. African rock art is not just an African heritage, but a World heritage.
 
Africa has the greatest variety and some of the oldest rock art on earth. About 30 countries in Africa have rock art with a total of between 10 and 20 million images. Major concentrations occur in the Sahara and Southern Africa.
 
As of 2008, there are nine rock art sites in Africa on the UNESCO World Heritage List and Tsodilo in Botswana is listed as one of them.
 
With one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world, Tsodilo has been called the 'Louvre of the Desert'. Over 4,500 paintings are preserved in an area of only 10 km2 of the Kalahari Desert. The archaeological record of the area gives a chronological account of human activities and environmental changes over at least 100,000 years. Local communities in this hostile environment respect Tsodilo as a place of worship frequented by ancestral spirits.
 
Justification for Inscription

For many thousands of years the rocky outcrops of Tsodilo in the harsh landscape of the Kalahari Desert have been visited and settled by humans, who have left rich traces of their presence in the form of outstanding rock art.

Tsodilo is a site that has witnessed visits and settlement by successive human communities for many millennia.

The Tsodilo outcrops have immense symbolic and religious significance for the human communities who continue to survive in this hostile environment.
 
Link to Website
http://www.africanrockart.org/