Rock Art on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Spatial Configuration, Territorial Scale, and the Granularity of Recognition

Abstract

UNESCO World Heritage properties containing rock art range from individual decorated caves to serial systems of hundreds of components and landscapes covering several million hectares. These disparities affect documentation, monitoring, visitor management, and emergency protection, yet they are obscured by the official distinction between single and serial properties. This study examines a global corpus of 57 properties inscribed through 2025. Official records and maps were used to code property form, core area, region, category, inscription date, and component structure. The documented spatial organization of the relevant rock art localities or components was then classified using a fourfold typology developed for this study, combining official UNESCO property form with spatial configuration: Single (clustered), Single (diffuse), Serial (clustered), and Serial (dispersed). Rock art’s role in the adopted Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) was coded as Primary when it constituted the principal basis of recognition, Integrated when it formed one of several major attributes conveying OUV, and Marginal when it played only a secondary or contextual role. The final corpus comprises 35 single and 22 serial properties, but its spatial distribution is 16 Single (clustered), 19 Single (diffuse), ten Serial (clustered), and twelve Serial (dispersed). Core area ranges from approximately 1 ha to 7.2 million ha. Single (diffuse) properties dominate the largest classes, whereas seventeen of the twenty-three properties in the two smallest classes assign rock art a Primary OUV role. Across these spatial classes, the present study identifies two recurrent modes of territorial definition. Landscape enclosure occurs where dispersed rock art localities and the areas between them are incorporated within a continuous property boundary. Selective serialisation occurs where a broader archaeological distribution is represented by a set of spatially separated inscribed components, leaving the intervening territory outside the property. The thirteen properties in Geographical Africa—defined here as all properties geographically located in Africa, including two North African properties assigned by UNESCO to the Arab States region—are characterised by unusually large territorial extents, and seven are classified as Single (diffuse). Regional totals therefore conceal major differences in territorial aggregation and in the visibility accorded to rock art. The critical issue is not only whether rock art is inscribed, but at what spatial granularity it is recognised. In extensive properties, effective protection requires locality-level inventories and monitoring systems that translate broad formal boundaries into operational management units.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Heritage, 2026 · DOI ↗