'The Greatest Museum of Prehistoric Art in thewhole World'. Such was the description HenriLhote gave to the rock paintings of the Tassili-n-Ajjer , the massif (a designated World Heritage Site)that lies to the northeast of Ahaggar in the AlgerianCentral Sahara. His expedition spent 16months in the Tassili in 1956-7 making 'discoveryafter discovery' and copying 'hundreds uponhundreds of painted walls'.Lhote's work is now recognized for its denigrationof almost all and sundry. He likened thelocal people, the Tuareg, who made many of his'discoveries', to wolves and living by the laws ofthe jungle. Significantly, he made no referencein his 'discovery claims' to Yolande Tschudi, theSwiss ethnologist, whose work preceded his own.Worse still, he undertook what might be regardedtoday as the systematic vandalism of the sites,not only by liberally washing the paintings torestore their colour, but by collecting and removingcopious quantities of material artefacts fromthe area.