Abstract
Revealed to Western eyes nearly a hundred and sixty years ago, the rock paintings and engravings of the Sahara have generated a great deal of interest and literature. In the specific context of the Sahara, they provide precious evidence of the ideal or material elements of the societies that produced them, which are unfortunately unlikely to be found in excavations. To this day, however, their inventory remains very incomplete, and their contribution to our knowledge of their authors very limited, both because of the difficulties of inventorying and the absence of dating, and because of the paradigmatic and methodological errors perpetuated in their study. In recent decades, however, the development of a more rigorous conceptual and methodological approach, as well as innovations in digital technology, have opened up new prospects for the study of rock images, both in terms of corpus building and analysis.
