Tadrart Acacus
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How it came to be
In the rocky massif of Tadrart Acacus, east of Ghat in south-western Libya, there are thousands of rock paintings in very different styles. They date from 12,000 BCE to 100 CE and show hunting, daily life, ritual dances and animals. The range continues into Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria.
The area is desert now, but the paintings record marked changes in its plants and animals and in the ways of life of the people who lived there. Hunter-gatherers lived in the mountains through the humid phases of the Holocene, and domestic animals had arrived by about 7000 years ago. Pottery from the area carries milk fats about 7,500 years old, the earliest recorded trace of processed milk.
The Italian archaeologist Fabrizio Mori published studies of the rock art in the 1960s. The site was inscribed in 1985, but since April 2009 at least ten rock-art sites have been deliberately damaged. In 2016 all five of Libya's World Heritage sites were placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.
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