Hi, I'm Elizabeth Galvin.
I'm the curator of the African Rock Art Image Project
here at the British Museum.
Rock art can be a lot of different things,
it can be paintings, engravings or other types of art
that's expressed on a rock shelter, a cave wall,
or even a boulder out in the middle of the desert.
Rock art can be any size.
It can be a really small, little beautiful engraved figure
that's about this big.
Or it can be a over 5 metre tall giraffe, such as a Niger.
Rock art can depict anything.
It's as diverse as the continent is itself.
It can have human figures, it can have animals,
it can have geometric figures.
Symbols that mean something to that culture and even
can serve as a historical record of what was going
on around them.
We have an amazing example of a European ship that
was painted in Southern Africa, by an indigenous
community there.
It's hard to know why people created rock art.
It might have been for their belief system.
It might have been for their own culture.
It might have just been boredom.
But one thing that's really interesting is that people
take these symbols and motifs and adapt them to their
own culture.
We know that rock art was practiced over tens of
thousands of years in Africa and when people came
by and saw these images sometimes they changed them,
sometimes they co-opted the symbols and painted
them elsewhere and sometimes they just wanted to
recreate it.
I've always loved rock art because I love to look at it
as an extension of a groups material culture.
I'm an anthropologist, not an archaeologist so I like to
look at the symbols and meanings on rock art and
match it with what the historical record that we know
was going on there at a certain time.
What you're able to do is really see how people express
the world around them and not only just the importance
of what is depicted, but the skill and artistry of what
is there is truly humbling.
What's also important is to record these digitally.
Instead of just going out and collecting the pieces of
rock, we're actually leaving them in situ.
So, they're still out there but what we're able to do is
take a photograph of it and create a record of what
this rock art looks like now.
Not only to compare it against previous photographs
we have but to preserve it for future generations.
I'm a curator with 25,000 objects and they're all
in my office - sitting on a hard drive.
Check out our website for more information, exciting
interactive maps, 3D models and articles all about
rock art - how it was made, who made it and where
it's from.
Make sure to subscribe to the British Museum's channel.
Thank you.