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Map of the world average speed of broadband Internet connection, as of June 2017 (modified, after Smith 2017)
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First visited by westerners in the mid-nineteenth century, Saharan rock art has since received a great deal of attention. The richness and diversity of this region is recognised by the inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list of three properties: Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria, Tadrart Acacus in Libya, and Ennedi in Chad. The situation in many North...
Citations
... (photo: E. Galvin) this issue). Databases can provide easily researchable data sets for study, but often these are only published in English, or another European language, which can limit its reach and even potentially alienate local communities who speak alternate languages, something the ARAIP project team are acutely aware of, as are the AAArC team and others (Lenssen-Erz et al. 2018, di Lernia 2018. ...
The African Rock Art Image Project at the British Museum has documented and disseminated c. 24,000 digital images of rock art from throughout the continent, donated by the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA). The images were registered into the British Museum’s permanent collection and treated as objects in their own right, not just digital reproductions of objects. As a wholly born-digital collection, this led to several opportunities and challenges for documentation, dissemination, and digital humanities outputs, including a fully searchable database, social media, website, 3D modelling and printing, and virtual reality, to name a few. Increasingly, digital technologies are being used in standard archaeological research and practice. From digital photography to larger 3D modelling/scanning, the volume of data being created by archaeologists is increasing exponentially, as is the potential for these outputs to change research and community engagement. But with the massive amounts of data being created, are researchers documenting and disseminating their data to their full potential? Here, traditional museum practices of cataloguing, storing, and public engagement can inform archaeological practice to use these data collections for both scholarly research and community engagement. Through a critically reflective description of the work and challenges of the project, this paper argues that there are significant benefits to be gained by engaging digital rock art projects with established museum thinking and practice.
The Ennedi plateau region of north-east Chad is a spectacular sandstone erosional landscape comprising arches, pillars, mushroom rocks and other weathering forms. These landforms are found in associated with isolated sandstone hills (buttes and inselbergs), relict and sand-filled alluvial wadi channels, and in exceptional cases permanent water-filled pools (gueltas). Although little is known about these different landforms, with reference to similar sandstone landscapes elsewhere it is likely that rock structures and episodic surface availability have influenced spatial and temporal variations of erosional processes and thus landform development in the region. A model is proposed to explain Ennedi landscape evolution, set in a regional climatic and environmental context.
