Dotted across the Saharan massifs and plateaus are millennia-old rock engravings and paintings that act as anchors to a profound historical continuity, bridging the present with the ancient past. Particularly, the enormous plateaus of Tassili n’Ajjer are rife with depictions of animals and humans caught in the midst of mundane, everyday activities. Dating back an impressive 12,000 years, Tassilian rock art takes varying forms—sharp, deep etchings, shallow peckings, paintings made with natural pigments—and provides what is possibly the earliest record of life in the prehistoric central Sahara. The Neolithic rock art of Tassili n’Ajjer forms the foundation of this paper, wherein I focus on the chronicles of its so-called discovery. Prior to its designation as a National Park in 1972 by the postcolonial government in Algeria, this region has been the target of numerous expeditions, each of which has set out to discover and document its much-talked-about petroglyphs. The original “discoverer” of the Tassili frescoes has been a topic of debate in Western archaeological circles for quite some time. The epithet has been attributed, among others, to Lieutenant Brenans, a French Foreign Legion camel corps officer who is said to have found them in 1933, and French archaeologist Henri Lhote, who made a similar claim in 1956. These petroglyphs may have seemed like a lost treasure to outsiders, but the Kel Tamasheq people of the Sahel-Sahara considered them an intrinsic part of local, quotidian knowledge and life in the desert. What constitutes acceptable and ethical research methods is the central question of this study. Has any explorer ever set foot on Indigenous soil without unintentionally or intentionally introducing some form of devastation? Indeed, as the paper details, a disturbing tableau of destruction, despoilment, disenfranchisement, and cultural erasure emerges from the research histories surrounding Tassilian art. By addressing the researchers’ moral dilemmas, this study seeks to contribute to the wider conversation about responsible research methods and the deleterious consequences of scholarly endeavors in geographies developmentally marginalized by colonial enterprise.