Brazilian petroglyphs in his Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil, probably the world’s earliest known reproductions of rock art.

Also during the sixteenth century, some Spanish missionaries in Latin America realized that certain rock art sites were religious in nature and remained sacred to the native population: for example, a late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century document from mexico, written by Padre Andrés Pérez de Ribas, mentions that a cleric in the northern part of Sinaloa saw a native stop in front of a sculptured stone decorated with some crude figures and make some demonstrations of reverence. Consequently, the clerics either destroyed such images or engraved crosses in high or prominent places at the sites to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity. In some cases, they actually superimposed crosses on the rock art, for example, at Peña Escrita in the Andean zone of Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

The earliest mention of rock art in Mexico is in the sixteenth-century book Monarquía Indiana by Juan de Torquemada, who linked examples of rock art with the chief toltec and aztec god, Quetzalcoatl: “Quetzalcoatl arrived at another place, a hill near the village of Tlalnepantla, two leagues from this city of México, where he sat down on a stone, and placed his hands on it, and left their imprint there, of which traces can still be seen today… and at present it is called Temacpalco, which means, in the palm of the hand.”

The first investigations of Bolivian rock art began early in the colonial period. The priest Alonso Ramos Gavilán, in his book Historia de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana (1621), mentioned four rock art sites. In three of them, the Spanish found engraved “footprints” in the rock, but instead of attributing them to Quetzalcoatl, as in Mexico, they assumed them to be the traces of a Christian saint—an idea that fit their theory that there had been a Christian missionary in the Andes in pre-Columbian times. Some of them believed the missionary to have been St. Thomas, who was said to have preached on the South American continent and to have left his footprints when he moved on. The fourth site was described as having “letters written on a rock”—early explorers often saw rock art as ancient writing.

In a document of 1615, Padre Rodrigo de Cabredo wrote to the padre general telling of a legend that circulated in the area of the bay of Banderas in the southwestern part of the state of Nayarit, Mexico: On a crag of a sierra here “there is sculpted a most devout Christ, and below it some lines of ancient characters; and the letters… contained many little dots, and must be Hebrew.… [I]n these mountains can be seen a little crag on which, in the manner of a ladder, there are imprinted the tracks of this saintly man [i.e., a preacher called Matias or Mateo].”

A. de Calancha, in Crónica moralizada de la Orden de San Agustin en el Perú (1638), published a drawing of petroglyphs on a rock at Calango, near Lima, including a footprint that he believed was that of a saint and other motifs that he saw as keys, an anchor, and letters. He reported that because the stone was still the object of superstitious worship on the part of the Indians, Hispanic visitors had the figures ground down and a cross placed at the head of the rock. De Calancha felt that this was enough to eliminate any superstition and that the perpetrators were wrong to “erase a footprint that was so worthy of veneration, but perhaps it was an impulse from heaven.”

In 1695, a remarkable book appeared in Amsterdam, Adriaan van Berkel’s Amerikaansche Voyagien, behelzende een Reis na Rio de Berbice etc., which refers to an Indian tribe in Guyana called the Acquewyen (Akawai): the book describes near their trading place many cliffs upon which can still be seen the marks of the Spaniards who first discovered the coast and penetrated the river. Once again, therefore, petroglyphs were explained as being marks by people from the Old World.

The first reports also emerged from North America at this time. In 1673 a Jesuit father, Jacques Marquette, who was exploring the upper Mississippi River in the United States, noted in his journal hideous, painted winged monsters high on a cliff near Alton in modern state of Illinois. Unfortunately, Marquette’s original drawing of the figure was lost when his canoe capsized on the St. Lawrence River as he was returning from the Mississippi area. Other discoveries