African Rock Art – by David Coulson &, A. Campbell

Hardcover
The African landscape is littered with information about its prehistoric inhabitants, no more so than in its broad range of rock art. This large book forms one of the best and most comprehensive illustrated guides to the art containing almost 400 colour photographs and line drawings. Detailed discussions of the African land and its people, of the different styles, subjects and dating of the art, and the sites themselves, are followed by a regional study of examples. Includes stunning photographs of some of the most precious, and most threatened, art images in the world.

From Publishers Weekly

At the end of the last Ice Age (over 12,000 years ago), artists throughout Africa produced stunning work that survives to this day on boulders and cliffs, and in caves. In African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone, Alec Campbell (founder and first director of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana) and photographer David Coulson (coauthor, Namib, The Lost World of the Kalahari) survey the genre with more than 200 color photos and 178 line drawings that detail elements of these complex compositions.
From 20-foot giraffes carved into stone in Niger's Air Mountains to a (probably) 6,000-year-old Libyan painting of a hairdressing scene, the photos are hauntingly beautiful. In addition to its considerable contributions to art history and human history the book, with its foreword by the late star paleontologist Mary Leakey, should raise public awareness of the plight of these masterpieces, now endangered by erosion and vandalism.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

It was like entering an obscure art gallery and stumbling across a Renoir. "That was how British photographer David Coulson described for People magazine the wonder and astonishment he experienced upon first gazing at an engraving of two majestic 20-foot-tall giraffes carved into stone.
256 page coffee table book.