Rock Art Research

The Pha Taem rock art is located on a cliff at a bank of the Ou River in Laos. It can be divided into eight groups with more than 300 images, including hand prints, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, ‘boats’ and geometric symbols, and all of them are drawn with red pigment. Among them, the number of hand prints is the largest, accounting for more than half of the total number of images. Researchers believe that the rock art is about 4000 years old. However, after analysing and comparing the corpus with the surrounding areas, especially the materials in Yunnan Province, China, we find that the date of the rock art should be around 2000 years BP, about the middle and late Western Han Dynasty in China, falling within the range of the age of the Cangyuan rock art (Warring States to the Eastern Han Dynasty, 475 BCE–220 CE). From the aspects of their environments, contents and rock art site names, the Pha Taem rock art shares many similarities with the Cangyuan rock art, indicating that there may be some cultural connections between the ethnic groups who painted them.