page_title: Rock art of south Oran (Algeria)
section_title: Classification of Henri Lhote
hierarchical_section_title: Rock art of south Oran (Algeria) / Classification of Henri Lhote
caption_attribution_description: gravure préhistorique du Sud-oranais (Algérie)
context_page_description: The rock art of south Oran, are prehistoric engravings dating from the Neolithic period, which are found in the south of Oran Province, Algeria, in the Saharan Atlas Mountains, in the regions of Figuig, Ain Sefra, El-Bayadh, Aflou and Tiaret. Comparable engravings have been described, even further east, around Djelfa and in the region of Constantine. Although in the past some archaeologists affirmed that these engravings derived from European Upper Paleolithic art, this theory is today definitively rejected.
context_section_description: Henri Lhote distinguished seven series in the mural art of the South Oranian.
  1. Large engravings of monumental naturalistic style, or Large-scale Hartebeest style.    Beside the great hartebeest, elephants and rhinoceros, Lhote placed the numerous ostriches and antelopes, boars, lions and panthers. The animals are represented absolutely in profile apart from the hartebeest, in relative profile (the two-eyed formula being frequent). Lhote placed in this ensemble the human images which accompany them (of which the hands and feet have almost always six digits). No human figure with animal head having been found, he observed that "the hartebeest ensembles of the Saharan Atlas differ from those of Tassili-n-Ajjer and of Fezzan where these figures are running. The author also thinks that the domestication of the dog was achieved in this period and that the South Oranian presents the most ancient rock testimonies to it. This first stage also includes the "mythic animals". All these engravings are made by a punctuation of little dots or hollows, more or less connected, and then most often by a polishing apparently helped by a wooden utensil with the addition of wet sand. Some engravings show a beginning of polishing in the endoperigraphic area (head), others a complete polishing.
  2. Small engravings in naturalistic style, or small-scale hartebeest stage. The stage would be constituted by the collection of engravings of more reduced size, of which the style has been designated as "School of Tazina" after the name of one of the sites. These naturalistic images show the same fauna (hartebeest, elephant and rhinoceros) as those of the preceding group but in very conventionalised forms, the legs and tails of the animals being very thinned out, the lines of the horns and the muzzle prolonged in a 'fantastic' way (Flamand), the lengthening of the body, the hind-quarters and the heads having inspired faulty identifications. The style is however not uniform and on certain murals these characteristic deformations co-exist with more realistic depictions. From a technical standpoint the finish of the engravings is regular, no trace surviving of a preliminary dotting-out, and the patina is similar to that of the preceding stage. The human depictions show the same character but the terminal parts of the limbs, hands and feet are generally rounded-off.
  From a chronological viewpoint, a single station (Koudiat Abd El Hak) shows an indisputable over-drawing, a little antelope with attenuated legs being overdrawn by a large elephant, although another would appear to be later than it. This fact obliged Lhote "to ask himself if the small-scale school might be earlier than that of the large engravings, or even if the two schools might have been contemporary." This latter hypothesis would have implied the existence "of two different gatherings of humans living side by side or, at the least, two artistic schools operating in parallel."
  In his analysis Lhote shows that beyond the great similarity of the fauna represented and of the presence of the "orant-ram" association in both stages, the "orant-hartebeest" association was not indicated in the second, whereas the antelopes there are more numerous and the lions rarer. He adds that "the small-scale style extends towards the south Moroccan as far as the Rio de Oro, although the large-scale style remained confined in the south oran area, with certain migrations towards the north-east." The author's opinion therefore leans therefore towards the existence of two groups. Furthermore, the style of the small-scale art, by comparison with the static forms of the large-scale figures, reflects "rather an art which has already attained conventional formulae", "more advanced in the sense of a more evolved creative impulse" and therefore later. But in this hypothesis one should be able to rediscover traces of this so distinctive style in the later group of the decadent engravings, even though these seem, to the contrary, to derive from the large-scale school. In his conclusions the author considers that the small-
caption: Gouiret bent Saloul, human figure sexually displayed, with axe and shield
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