An Overview of Rock Art Sites in Gansu Province, China

Abstract

The paper presents a brief overview of rock art sites known to date on the territory of Gansu Province in north-western China. Petroglyphs have been discovered in all parts of the province, most of them concentrate in the north-western and central parts of the region. Over the past decades, a significant number of rock art sites has been found in the eastern and south-eastern parts of Gansu, but many materials from this territory have not yet been published or were published in hard-to-get local periodicals, quite often without any illustrations. The purpose of this article is to fill the lacuna in the rock art studies of this part of China through the generalization of all available data on Gansu petroglyphs and listing the rock art sites known to date. Petroglyphs of Gansu can be generally attributed to the northern province of Chinese rock art. The techniques used to produce images include percussion (pecking), abrasion (scratching or rubbing) and engraving, no painted images have been discovered so far. At the same time, pronounced differences between rock art sites in different parts of the province can be observed: the sites in the north-western and central parts of the region have obvious similarities with the rock art traditions of Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet and (to a lesser degree) Inner Mongolia, while the petroglyphs of eastern and south-eastern parts of Gansu are close to the rock art of Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and partly to the petroglyphs of Jucishan in Henan Province.