attached to prehistoric images. Only two years later, one traveler, Pierre de Montfort, wrote a letter to his wife that mentioned the Vallée des Merveilles in the Alps as “an infernal place with figures of devils and a thousand demons carved everywhere on rocks.” In the sixteenth century, Onorato Lorenzo, a priest from the same region wrote a large unpublished manuscript called “Accademio dei Giordani di Belvedere” that contained information obtained from shepherds, and this manuscript mentions the “Meraviglie” and provides a long list of rock-art motifs and subjects.

The earliest known documentation of rock carvings in Europe occurred in sweden when some seventeenth-century drawings of petroglyphs at Backa Brastad near tanum, Bohuslän (at that time part of Norway, itself linked to denmark) were made by Peder Alfssön, a schoolmaster from Kristiania (Oslo), and sent to one ole worm, the king of Denmark’s doctor. Worm, a renowned polymath and founder of museums, had sent out questionnaires to educated people in the provinces, mainly priests, asking them to notice the location, setting, and dimensions of ancient monuments and, if possible, to make drawings, investigate how the monuments were constructed, and ascertain what the local people said or believed about them. Alfssön produced freehand wash drawings and accompanying text, which, amazingly, still survive in Copenhagen, having escaped several wars and great fires (they remained forgotten until published as small copperplate engravings by P.F. Suhm in 1784). It is not known exactly when the drawings were made, but they were made a part of the Copenhagen archives in 1627, which makes them the oldest known drawings of rock art in the world.

Alas, Worm made no mention of rock art in his 1643 book on ancient Denmark, and Alfssön, of course, had no inkling of the art’s antiquity. The latter believed that the carvings—including a large human figure subsequently nicknamed Skomakeren (“the shoemaker”)—were medieval graffiti by apprentice stonemasons working on the construction of a church in the vicinity. It was only in the eighteenth century that scholars came to realize that such carvings were very old, though at first it was believed they depicted historical events such as battles between Viking ships.

In the Alps, a French historian, Abbé Pietro Gioffredo, wrote Storia delle Alpi Marittime (ca. 1650) and based his somewhat fanciful account of the Vallée des Merveilles on Onorato Lorenzo: “Various stones of all colours, flat and smooth, decorated with engravings of a thousand imaginary subjects, representing quadrupeds, birds, fish, agricultural or military mechanical instruments dating from several centuries, and… the authors of such merry jokes were shepherds trying to avoid boredom.”

In russia, petroglyphs (pissanye kamni, or “written stones”) were mentioned in the notes made by travelers, ambassadors, and merchants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, a Moldavian prince, Nikolai Milesku Spafarii, an ambassador for Czar Alexei Romanov, traveled through Siberia to China in 1675 and mentioned petroglyphs in the Yenisey Valley in his travel notes. Tomskaya Pisanitsa in Siberia was described in a Russian chronicle of the seventeenth century as a big stone with the images of animals, birds and people, and in 1692, the Dutch traveler and scientist Nicolaas Witsen, a friend of Peter the Great, published a book Nord und Ost Tartaray (North and East Tartary) in Amsterdam (2d ed., 1705). In effect, that work was the first Siberian encyclopedia, and it contained descriptions of “ancient paintings,” including rock pictures on the River Irbit in the Ural Mountains.

Developments in the New World

The major development of the sixteenth century occurred in the New World where “inscriptions” of various kinds were spotted, and sometimes described and illustrated, by conquering Europeans exploring the interior of Brazil. During the first centuries of the conquest, members of various religious orders also penetrated the interior of Amazonia. The earliest known information on rock art in this area is attributed to Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, who, in 1598, recorded the existence of rock engravings in the present state of Paraíba on the Araçai River. In 1618, Brandão published drawings of motifs in