Abstract
Saharan rock archives have aroused the enthusiasm of comparatists who have sought to study them as if they were the notebooks of ancient anthropologists. Some have thought they could be deciphered in the light of Fulani traditions, which would be their current echo, while others have used them to reconstruct long-distance relationships, from the Nile to the Atlantic. Over the last few decades, documentation has been considerably enriched, and comparative excesses have given way to more modest attempts, enriched by archaeological and environmental data, to shed light on relationships between neighboring groups through the study of specific graphic motifs. In this way, the history of Saharan pastoralism, from the Middle Holocene to the beginnings of agriculture, is becoming clearer.
