wind or water that filters through these same rocks from the hill above, with all this, after much time, they remain highly visible.… Without scaffolds or other implements suitable for the purpose, only giant men would have been able to paint at so much height.

Hence, the Cochimí, the local people, had legends disassociating them and their ancestors from the painters, and the missionaries thought the paintings impressively old. Del Barco also wrote:

The people of this land say that the giants were so large that, when they painted the ceiling of a cave, they lay on their backs on the ground and that even thus they were able to paint the highest part. An enormous fable that, for its verification, would necessitate those men to have a height of at least thirty feet, unless we imagine extremely long paint brushes in their hands!… It is simpler to persuade oneself that, for this work, they found and conveyed to the cave, or caves, some wood with which to form a scaffold.

Africa and Australia

The eighteenth century also saw the first discoveries of rock art in africa. The earliest reference is from 1721, when an ecclesiastic in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique mentioned paintings of animals on rocks in a report to the Royal Academy of History in Lisbon. In 1752, explorer Domingo van de Walle de Cervellón reported engravings in the cave of Belmaco on Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. These meandering pecked motifs were considered to be mere doodles, produced by chance or the imagination of the ancient barbarians. That same year, explorers led by Ensign August Frederick Beutler, who were more than 200 miles from their Capetown base, noticed rock paintings in the valley of the Great Fish River in the Eastern Cape, which they recognized to be the work of “the little Chinese” (bushmen).

The first known copies of rock art in the region were made in 1777–1778 by an expedition to the Sneeuwbergen (“snowy mountains”) of the Eastern Cape led by Governor Joachim van Plettenberg. The copies were made by Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon and his draftsman servant Johannes Schumacher—the latter had already copied probable petroglyphs or rock paintings (he called them teekeningen) in 1776 on an expedition to the western area area of the Cape that had been led by H. Swellenberg. In 1790–1791, on an expedition led by Grosvenor, Jacob van Reenen noted in his diary that “on a rocky cliff the Bushmen had made a great many paintings or representations of wildebeeste, very natural, and also of a soldier with a grenadier’s cap.”

The French traveler Le Vaillant published a book on South Africa at this time in which he dismissed the bushman paintings as “caricatures” and said of pictures in a cave in the Eastern Cape, “the Dutchmen believe them to be a century or two old and allege that the Bushmen worship them, but though it is quite possible, there is no evidence to show it.”

One of the first people who made an attempt to understand the rock art of southern Africa was Sir John Barrow, who was excited to see rock paintings on his journeys through Cape Colony and beyond in 1797 and 1798. He was filled with wonder that they could have been produced by people described by one writer in 1731 as “troops of abandon’d Wretches” lacking laws, fixed abodes, and religion: “In the course of travelling, I had frequently heard the peasantry mention the drawings in the mountains behind the Sneuwberg made by the Boujesmans; but I took it for granted they were caricatures only, similar to those on the doors and walls of uninhabited buildings, the works of idle boys; and it was no disagreeable disappointment to find them very much the reverse.”

The art’s beauty made him think that the San (bushmen) had been rendered “more savage” by the conduct of the European settlers. He was especially interested in the aesthetic aspects of the art, which he assumed was indeed “art” in the European sense. On inquiring about their age, he was told that some paintings were known to be new while others had been present since the first settlement of this part of the colony.

The other new continent whose rock art was “discovered” in this period was australia. There had been a report in 1678 by J. Keyts, a Dutch trader, of rock paintings on a cliff face in Speelmans Bay, western New Guinea (Irian Jaya), but