Les pintures rupestres prehistòriques del Zemmur(Sahara Occidental)

Resumen

The goal of the PhD is to study the rock-paintings of the Zemmur (Western Sahara). The Zemmur is a hilly area with many rock-shelters, which are pierced in the slopes of his sedimentary, low, flat and long hills. These paintigs were discovered in 1995 when the staff of the Ministry of Culture of the Sahrawi Democratic and Arabic Republic show them to a team of archaeologists and antrophologists from the Girona's University. The continued research campaigns have provided the data for this research, that is, 2734 images found in 130 rock-shelters of 5 different sites: Uad Ymal, Wadi Kenta, Rekeiz Ajahfun, Rekeiz Lemgasem and Asako. The hypothesis to contrast along this reserach were two. The first was that in the Zemmur several painting styles existed. The second was that most of these styles belong to prehistoric ages. Both have been verified as true and several arguments have been presented in order to support them. The research developed in making photos to the paintings, scanning, reproduce and study them. The study consisted in describing the paintigs, classify them in styles and dating the styles. The classification has been done in basis a morphological an technical criteria. After that, the images have been assigned to several styles, which had also been defined by morphotechnical criteria. The existence of these styles, and so the verification of the first hypothesis, is deduced from the presence of morphotechnical recorrences in the representations. Later those styles have been arranged in basis to the superpositions of images. The sequence of the five indentified styles, from the most ancient to the most recent, is: Dancers', Shaped, Stroked, Dark Figures, and Linial. At the end an attempt to date those styles has been done. Previous analisis had proven that radiometric datations were not possible due to the lack of organical remains in the paintigs. However the depictions of weapons, animal beings and texts have been useful in proving that most of these images belong to prehistoric ages, as our second hypothesis proposed. Finally we have reached the conclusion that the Dancers' style is dated, in a very aproximate way, between 3800 and 3200 years before us, as the depictions of hallebards prove. The Lineal style, the most recent, dates between 2400 and 2000 years before us because the presence of lybico-berber texts and the absence of camels. The Shaped, Stroked and Dark Figures styles should be between 3200 and 2400. Besides those conclusions, one of the most important results from this research has been the creation of the corpus of prehistorical rock-paintigs of the Zemmur, with thousands of reproduced images. So this research, besides having a great historical interest and bringing new data, should be useful to manage this archeological heritage.