Presentation of the illustrated thesaurus for Himalayan Rock Art

The illustrated thesaurus presented here was developed in the frame of the project Himalayan Rock Art Database (HiRADa).

It draws upon previous efforts of standardization in the field of rock art studies in general and Himalayan rock art in particular.

The thesaurus is a resource for the standard description of Himalayan Rock Art: it consists in 358 hierarchized terms most of them with precise definitions and 223 illustrations (for a total of 557 drawings).

Content

The three main concepts of the thesaurus reflect a multi-scalar approach to rock art which consists in recording its location (site and zone), its support (rock and surface) and its art (motif and scene).

-Location: the concept designates a rock art site that may have one or more zones (one zone minimum): 90 concepts.

-Support: the concept designates a rock bearing motif(s), either engraved (petroglyph) or painted (pictograph) that may have one or more surfaces (one surface minimum): 38 concepts.

-Art: the concept designates a motif which is a man-made (anthropic) trace engraved (petroglyph) or painted (pictograph) onto a natural surface of rock. The motifs may form a scene(s) by their interaction or association: 230 concepts.

Illustrations are available online in a specific image collection on Nakala (223 images): https://nakala.fr/collection/10.34847/nkl.23f1xxk4

Note on the drawings: some drawings are grey and black. The black element highlights the term (concept) that is being referred to and defined.

Contribute: the HiRADa thesaurus accepts contributions that add missing concepts which are relevant for the description of rock art. Although the focus of the thesaurus is currently on the Himalayas, contributions for neighbouring regions in Central and South Asia, are welcomed.

Authors

Laurianne Bruneau: laurianne.bruneau@ephe.psl.eu; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4257-1173

Martin Vernier: zskvernier@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4381-5712

Ani Danielyan: anidanielyan@gmail.com ; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1986-0719

Authors are responsible for the content of this publication (March 2023).

User guide for Opentheso: https://opentheso.hypotheses.org/4135 [consult pages 18-20 of the user guide in French available for upload. English version is upcoming]

Special thanks: we are much indebted to the following persons for sharing their advices, expertise and knowledge, that lead to the digital publication of this thesaurus, in chronological order: David Sarmiento-Castillo (ArScAn, France), the DiGA team (Digitization of Gandharan Artefacts - Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany) and Jason Neelis (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada).

Funding: the digital publication of the thesaurus on Opentheso was made possible thanks to support of the DISTAM consortium (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East): https://distam.hypotheses.org/

The following institutions are currently supporting the HiRADa project: