April 21, 2002

Reading the Mind Before It Could Read

By MICHAEL F. GIBSON

ROCK art represents the entire archives of human history prior to the invention of writing,'' says Emmanuel Anati. ``It is a mirror of the workings of the human mind over the past 50,000 years, and its study is vital to our understanding of the development of human intelligence.''

Mr. Anati, 71, is director of the Val Camonica Center for Prehistoric Studies and the founder, in 1985, of the World Archives of Rock Art. Both of these institutions are in Capo di Ponte, a northern Italian village in Val Camonica, which is surrounded by spectacular 3,000-foot mountains. (He is also a graduate of five universities: Harvard, the Sorbonne, Oxford, London and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)

Rock-art graphemes, as Mr. Anati calls the prehistoric signs and figures, are not restricted to a few famous caves (Lascaux in France, for instance, or Altamira in Spain). They are spread across all continents, and 45 million of them have been inventoried so far.

As many more, he suspects, remain to be found, recorded and studied. Clusters of caves near Bhopal, in India, for instance, may hold up to a million graphemes, and another million have been noted in caves in Lesotho, in Africa. A half-million wait in Algeria's Tassili region and as many more in the Sinai peninsula and the Negev Desert. Other sites are awaiting study in Central Asia, Siberia, China, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Malawi.

Today, however, with economic development shaping the landscape everywhere, many graphemes are being destroyed before anyone can record or study them. Mr. Anati, who has traveled to rock sites throughout the world, cites instances of such destruction in all latitudes and, to begin with, in his own precious Val Camonica (a World Heritage Site since 1979). There, a high-tension pylon was recently anchored directly on an engraved prehistoric surface.

Destruction has also taken place in the Dra Valley in Morocco, where a rock-art site has been turned into a stone quarry, and in the Matred Hills in the Negev in Israel, where another site was destroyed to create a training field for tanks. The same sort of thing also occurred not far away, at Ein Kuderat in Egypt. Farther east, a site was recently annihilated by a new road in Helan Shan in China, and a number of 20,000-year-old rock paintings in Kimberley, Australia, are being painted over by aborigines, who are thus destroying a vestige of their own prehistoric past.

With sites at risk on all continents, an international protocol, a legal framework, a body of regulations and an established routine are needed to ensure that the data is gathered, transmitted and recorded properly, Mr. Anati said. Last year he sounded the alarm in a letter to Koichiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco. Immediate action must be taken, he argued, to protect important sites and allow scientists to, at the very least, record and study lesser sites before they are blasted away to build roads, airports, dams or warehouses.

This is the purpose of the World Archives of Rock Art Project. To date, in five rooms in his offices in Capo di Ponte, Mr. Anati and his staff of three have assembled a library of 40,000 books and reprints, 16,400 feet of rolls with tracings of graphemes, several thousand reports from various parts of the world, and a collection of 300,000 slides, representing about one-150th of all known material.

But his long-term ambition is to create a computerized database recording all graphemes everywhere, classifying them geographically, chronologically and typologically on the basis of his method of structural analysis. Such a database would provide a tremendous store of graphic material of exceptional interest to artists, he believes, and could generate considerable income. But above all, he says, it could be used by scientists and thus could ``ultimately change our understanding of human history.''

``For if we are willing to consider rock-art graphemes as full-fledged historical documents,'' he says, ``then the framework of human history will be expanded tenfold, from 5,000 to 50,000 years. It is my ambition to bring about a cultural revolution by changing the perception we have of our distant past.''

Mr. Anati created a stir in 1984, when he published the results of years of research around Har Karkom, a mountain in the Negev that, he argues, is the site the redactor of Exodus had in mind when he described the mountain of the Ten Commandments.

``This,'' he says, ``does not necessarily mean that Moses and the children of Israel were actually there. That is an entirely different issue.''

In the mid-90's, Jaca, an Italian publisher, urged Mr. Anati to undertake the first synthesis of rock art worldwide. He was daunted by the scope of the task at first but finally accepted it. The result is a stunningly illustrated encyclopedic work, ``Rock Art Around the World'' (in Italian, French and German, 1995 and 1997).

In it he points out that a unified system of signs (including what he calls pictograms and psychograms) appeared with surprising simultaneity in the earliest prehistoric art in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and North and South America. This suggests that as the first humans fanned out across the world, they bore with them a primal artistic idiom. Such is also the opinion of Yves Coppens, a leading French paleontologist, who sees in this development ``the dawn of a new conceptual age.''

In Mr. Anati's opinion, ``only later did regional singularities appear.'' Certain recurrent symbols (the bisected triangle, pairs of short parallel lines, dots, sets of wavy lines) are indeed found all over the world, and he believes they can be interpreted by applying a measure of empathy and taking into account basic human needs and perceptions in a given environment.

That early humans could have devised such a system of signs is not surprising in itself. As James Fevrier observed some 40 years ago in his history of writing: ``Paleolithic hunters had learned to identify several hundred different tracks in the snow. These they associated with various types of animals, neighboring tribes and so on. One may consequently claim that they had learned to read before knowing how to write.''

Mr. Anati says: ``My biggest surprise in exploring prehistoric art came from the realization that human imagination is quite limited. With few exceptions, I have found the same five subjects recurring constantly all over the world: human figures, animal figures, weapons and tools, topographic signs, ideograms and symbols.''

In spite of this perceived limitation, anyone leafing through his harvest of works illustrating the first millenniums of artistic activity cannot help being dazzled by their diversity and control and humbled by the evidence that formal and expressive perfection was present from the very first moment.