soon followed: on the east bank of the Taunton River in Massachusetts, the first drawing of Native American petroglyphs on Dighton Rock (a large rock covered with deeply incised abstract designs and highly stylized human figures) were made by colonists in 1680—although the markings have been attributed by some people on the fringe of archaeology to Norsemen, Phoenicians, Scythians, and Portuguese explorers. The pictograph site of La Roche-à-l’Oiseau on the Outaouais River in quebec was mentioned in 1686 in connection with Indians throwing down offerings of tobacco when they passed close to the rock.

The Age of Enlightenment

In the eighteenth century, a time when so many fields of inquiry began to be transformed into serious topics of study, a more profound and sustained interest began, and rock art was reported on two more continents. As yet, however, serious study developed very sporadically and slowly.

For instance, in Ireland, Newgrange and the other decorated tombs were frequently described and illustrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “rude carvings” at Killin, County Louth, were reported by Wright in 1758. Regarding Scandinavian rock art, a letter from a superintendent of the Swedish-Norwegian border written in 1751 mentions carvings in Bohuslän: “In the parish of Tanum, not far from the sea, I have also visited a sloping rock, where a man with spear in his hand is cut, and about whom is said that a Scottish commander had been killed in his flight during a military campaign and that the position of his dead body was reproduced in the rock.” The letter’s plea for an inventory to be started in the parish fell on deaf ears.

Also in the mid-eighteenth century, the great cairn of Kivik in Skane, southern Sweden, was discovered, and the carved figures on the stone slabs of its central cist were drawn in very professional fashion by Carl Gustaf Hilfeling, an antiquarian who specialized in depiction and description. The much-traveled Hilfeling also visited Bohuslän, and his travel books published after 1792 include several drawings of monuments and rock carvings in that region. He produced measured drawings done to scale, not freehand sketches, and his pictures are full of comments on size, distance, and location. Unfortunately, he had a tendency to see nonexistent runic inscriptions on some rocks.

In 1719, Czar Peter the Great sent a young doctor and naturalist, Daniel-Gotlieb Messerschmidt, to lead a scientific expedition to study the nature and population of Siberia. In Tobolsk, Messerschmidt met Philip Johann Tabbert von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who was a prisoner in Siberian exile, and together they carried out the first scientific excavations in the region. In 1722, Messerschmidt made a drawing of a rock with symbols, images of animals, and a man. He also discovered runic inscriptions on rocks that were determined to be old Turkic in 1893; earlier, they conjured up romantic ideas about Vikings and Germans and led Messerschmidt to investigate ancient rock images more closely and make copies of them.

In his diary entry for 23 February 1722, he reported that by the Yenisey River, not far from the village of Birjusa, near Krasnoyarsk, there were all kinds of “characters” and figures, written in red, to which the locals ascribed all kinds of meanings because the motifs were quite high above the river on smooth, steep rocks so the locals could not understand how people could have made them there. He also noted that the locals called them pisannyj kamen. On 18 August of the same year, Messerschmidt saw numerous Scythian graves bearing stones covered with figures, some of which he published as drawings. His diary entry for 26 September mentions that at the Gordovaja stena he once again saw characters and figures about eight and a half meters above the river level that were made with a crimson and indelible color.

In 1730, liberated and back home in Sweden, von Strahlenberg published a book (Das Nord- und Östliche Theil von Europa und Asia), the first scientific publication about the archaeological monuments of the Yenisey region (Siberia), including petroglyphs. Other expeditions to Siberia followed, and these also examined the archaeology and rock art of the region. For example, the historian Gerhard-Friedrich Mueller