Reflection on the scarcity of images of children

Discover the eleventh session of the seminar “Regards croisés sur la petite enfance” 2024-2025": "Reflection on the scarcity of images of children in pre- and protohistoric figurative expressions from the Sahara".

The seminar looks at early childhood as a social, historical and cultural construct. Theories and knowledge relating to the conception, birth and development of children are analyzed in terms of their interactions with their environment and gender norms. Against this backdrop, the seminar will explore the boundaries of this age category and address the question of its temporality according to medical, international, anthropological or historical standards.

What does this rarity reveal? Saharan rock art lends itself particularly well to this investigation. It includes 168 images of these “small subjects” among tens of thousands of paintings in rock shelters and outdoor rock engravings produced between the 7th millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD. This wealth of iconography makes it possible to study these figurations in context, and to understand why painters and engravers may have favored one theme over another. In view of the formal oddities of some of the representations surrounding the figurations of children, it is probable that the groups with a tradition of rock art in this region believed in the existence of genies who were invested with powers comparable to those that populate the imaginations of many West African populations today. The reading grid derived from this diachronic approach seems to be effective in explaining the marginality of images of children in figurative expressions in the Sahara, and in other regions of the world.

• Christian Dupuy: archaeologist affiliated with Institut des mondes africains (IMAf, CNRS). 
• Discussant: Doris Bonnet: anthropologist, IRD