and the concept of prehistory were accepted, so, too, did the study of rock art gradually begin to grow more widespread, more systematic, and better documented.

In Australia, discoveries multiplied in different areas. It was Matthew Flinders, a British navigator and explorer, who, while exploring and mapping the coastline, made the first discovery of rock shelters with paintings and stencils—on Chasm Island near Arnhem Land on the coast of Northern Territory—on 14 January 1803 during the first circumnavigation of the continent. His account describes the location, identifies some figures, considers the materials used, and even attempts an ethnographic interpretation with generalized meaning.

Some eighteen years later, Allan Cunningham made further discoveries on Clack Island, off Queensland, which he compared to those of Flinders. On 22 June 1821, Cunningham found a major collection of rock paintings, the first in Queensland. Flinders’s images had been produced with a burned stick, “but this performance, exceeding a hundred and fifty figures… appears at least to be one step nearer refinement than those simply executed with a piece of charred wood.”

Tasmania was next. On 4 September 1830, George Augustus Robinson, protector of the aborigines in Tasmania and Victoria, found an engraved circle surrounded with dots on the island’s northwestern coast. Three years later, in the same region, he “saw large circles cut on the face of rocks done by natives. Some of them were a foot and eighteen inches in diameter.”

The first Wandjina galleries of the Kimberley region in northern Western Australia were seen by the British explorer George Grey on 26 March 1838: “On looking over some bushes, at the sandstone rocks which were above us, I suddenly saw from one of them a most extraordinary large figure peering down upon me. Upon examination this proved to be a drawing at the entrance to a cave, which, on entering, I found to contain besides, many remarkable paintings.” Although Grey interpreted the patterns on the figure’s “halo” as an oriental script in his journals of two expeditions of discovery in northwestern and western Australia (1841), he was a true pioneer in that he made a great effort to produce detailed descriptions, measurements, and colored sketches of some panels at the site over the next few days.

In 1891, the explorer Joseph Bradshaw found an entirely different kind of rock art in the Kimberley area, the delicately painted figures that were to become known as “Bradshaws”: “numerous aboriginal paintings which appeared to be of great antiquity, and I do not attribute them to the presentations of the Black race.” He, too, published sketches.

The earliest report of the rock paintings in Arnhem Land was made by Ludwig Leichhardt in 1845; his first discovery was a rock shelter containing an image of a long-necked turtle. However, it was only with the incursion of European buffalo shooters into Kakadu in early 1880s that this area’s paintings became better known. In the 1870s, on a voyage in the McCluer Gulf (now Berau Bay), the Dutch trader T.B. Leon came across some rock paintings in New Guinea that he took to be Hindu symbols, and photographs were taken of New Guinea rock art in 1887.

Discoveries soon occurred in polynesia as well. In new zealand, a surveyor, Walter Mantell, made the first record of rock drawings at the Takiroa rock shelter (North Otago) on the south island of N.2 in 1852—elaborate and apparently nonfigurative designs in red and black. In Hawaii, William Ellis observed petroglyphs in 1824:

Along the southern coast, both on the east and west sides, we frequently saw a number of straight lines, semicircles, or concentric rings, with some rude imitations of the human figure, cut or carved in the compact rocks of lava. They did not appear to have been cut with an iron instrument, but with a stone hatchet, or a stone less frangible than the rock on which they were portrayed. On inquiry, we found that they had been made by former travellers, from a motive similar to that which induces a person to carve his initials on a stone or tree, or a traveller to record his name in an album, to inform his successors that he had been there.

He recorded the meaning of some motifs in what is one of the few existing firsthand accounts