The Beauty of the African Woman - Art painting in Mbigou stone - Height : 55 cm

Stone carving is an ancient activity of shaping pieces of stone or raw rock by the controlled removal of material, it is the act of artistic shaping of stone. Stone carving is a particular technique of sculpture in that it designates a mode of making a work different from modeling in clay or cast iron.

The term should not be confused with the activity of stonemasons who shape blocks of stone for sculpture but also for architecture, building or civil engineering. It is also a term used by archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to describe the manufacture of petroglyphs. There are sometimes two types of stone carving: - that of shaping a rock directly where it is - the much more widespread nowadays, based on the work of a block of stone previously extracted from a quarry.