Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art

By Abbé H. Breuil
Translated by Miss Mary E. Botle.

Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (28 February 1877 – 14 August 1961), often referred to as Abbé Breuil, was a French Catholic priest, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He studied cave art in the Somme and Dordogne valleys as well as in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China with Teilhard de Chardin, Ethiopia, British Somali Coast Protectorate, and especially southern Africa.
In 1929, when already a recognised authority on North African and European Stone Age art, he attended a congress on prehistory in South Africa. At the invitation of premier Jan Smuts he returned there in 1942 and began a professorship at Witwatersrand University from 1944 to 1951. During his South African stay he studied rock art in Lesotho, the eastern Free State and in the Natal Drakensberg. He performed three expeditions to South West Africa and Rhodesia between 1947 and 1950. He described this period as "the most thrilling years of my research life". He had excursions to South West Africa and Bechuanaland with a local archeologist, Kosie Marais. In 1953 he announced his discovery of a painting about 6,000 years old, subsequently dubbed The White Lady, under a rock overhang in Brandberg Mountain.

Reading copy, unusual in English.
Binding repaired.
Ex library copy.

250mm x 310mm x 42mm

R1,000