Good afternoon,everyone!

This is the first serninar in preparation for our archaeological fieldwork in Namibia;we are fantastically lucky to have received partial research funding for this trip from our Institute,so I shall expect 200% attention and participation from you all.First in this seminar,I'm going to give a brief introduction to contemporary research on rock art,and in the second part I'm going to give you some do's and don'ts for our fieldwork trip in April - so please listen very carefully.

I'm first going to focus on the interpretation of rock are in Namibia.We are very fortunate to be going to an area where you can find some of the most important sites in the entire world.And I hope to show you how easy it is for everyone to make mistakes in looking at cultures which are different from our own - the first and most important lesson we have to learn.

In Namibia there are both paintings and engravings - that's where the surface of the rock is cut out.Many of the engravings show footprints of animals and most scholars used to think that the purpose of these was simple and obvious:this rock art was like a school book with pictures to teach children about tracks:which track belonged to which animal - giraffe,lion and so on.