Event: PIZZA TALK: The ASArt-DATA Project in the frame of the Saharan rock art studies

Speaker:

Marina Gallinaro

Cotsen visiting scholar

Abstract:

Rock art is one of the most fascinating cultural manifestations of humankind. The integration of rock art studies within the archaeological and anthropological domain faces crucial challenges. The complexity of documentation and publication and lack of reliable dating have hampered its immense potential as an archaeological source. This is particularly true for the Sahara, where outstanding paintings and engravings are now inaccessible for security reasons and at risk of destruction due to social and political turmoil.

This talk will present aims, first results, and future perspectives of the project entitled Ancient Saharan Art – Decoding Art through Theoretically-sounded Archive (ASArt-DATA). This project focuses on Saharan rock art, proposing a new theoretical and methodological approach aimed at an integrated reading of the artworks, combining Archaeology, Anthropology, Visual Studies, and Digital Humanities. This work aspires to strengthen the connection between archaeological and anthropological studies, and between academy and society, thanks to the deployment of the underdeveloped potential of Rock Art.

The ASArt-DATA Project - funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 795744 - is carried out by the Sapienza University of Rome and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Bio:

Marina Gallinaro is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Researcher at the Department of Ancient World Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and Visiting Researcher at The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

She received her PhD in African Studies at the University of Naples, L’Orientale, with a project on the settlement patterns in mid-Holocene sites in the Egyptian Western Desert. Since then she has carried out projects in the Sahara region, both in Egypt and Libya and in East Africa, Central Sudan, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

Her research focuses on the interplay between human and environment in arid zones, and to the strategies that humans adopted to cope with the climatic changes. In particular, her interest addresses: the emergence of pastoralism in Africa, through the analysis of the archaeological landscape and the connections between geomorphological features and different sets of archaeological data; ii. African rock art study characterized by a landscape and contextual approach; and iii. Cultural Heritage Management and sustainable development projects, with a specific focus on cultural landscapes and rock art sites in Sahara and East Africa.