Unlike rock art in the Sahara and southern Africa, both extensively documented, rock art in central Africa is still widely unknown. Even though already reported in the sixteenth century by the missionary Diego Santissimo Sacramento (1583) and in the nineteenth century by James Tuckey (Tuckey and Smith 1818) during his exploration of the Congo River, it has never been the focus of a comprehensive research project. As a result, its age still remains uncertain. Preliminary research revealed one coherent entity: the Lovo Massif, which is the topic of my doctoral dissertation (Heimlich 2010, 2014).
Presently inhabited by the Ndibu, one of the Kongo subgroups, the Lovo Massif is situated north of the ancient Kongo kingdom (Fig. 1). Kongo has been, since the end of the fifteenth century, one of the best-documented kingdoms of Africa for recent periods in terms of historical records and...