recorded anywhere in the world during a period when petroglyphs were still being made.

As for easter island, its hundreds of giant statues were obviously seen and mentioned by the first known European discoverers—the Dutch in 1722—and by all subsequent visitors, but its rock engravings and paintings were not noticed, or at least not mentioned, until a four-day visit by a German vessel under the command of Lietenant-Captain Wilhelm Geiseler in 1882, which included a study of the painted slabs inside some houses, bas-relief petroglyphs of “the god of the seabird eggs,” and carvings of “the feminine sex” that adorn the rocks around the ceremonial cliff-top village of Orongo.

In various parts of Africa, rock art was, understandably enough, the first evidence of the past that attracted the attention of explorers: for example, in 1816, at the mouth of the River Congo (Zaïre), J. Tuckey, a British captain, observed a rock with engravings in what is now Angola; he named it Pedra do Feitiço (Fetish Rock) and published a detailed description of its human figures, animals, and various objects such as boats, rifles, and palanquins.

Sir James Alexander, another Briton, was traveling in 1835 near modern Oudtshoorn in South Africa and was taken to see overhanging rocks with paintings. In his 1837 book A Narrative of a Voyage of Observation among the Colonies of Western Africa, he included three copies of these paintings, which had been made by his guide, Major C.C. Mitchell, a civil engineer and surveyor general in the Cape. Like Barrow before him, Alexander was surprised to find “that these rude attempts of uncivilized artists are not utterly devoid of merit; and that although defective in proportions, there is more resemblance in them to the human figure than is ever seen imparted by persons, however educated, who have a total negation of graphic talent. This, indeed, is rendered most evident on the spot, by sundry miserable attempts at figures, made beside them by some civilized bungler.”

Alexander noticed that some of the art must be ancient, stating that Mitchell had made copies of all of the drawings that still remained uninjured by time and the weather. He noted that the color of the drawings seemed to have been produced by a preparation in which iron rust formed a principal ingredient. He believed the figures to be narratives and tried to “read” them.

A geologist, George Stow, made copies of rock art in the Orange Free State and Eastern Cape beginning in 1867, and in 1870, he said in a letter:

I have been making pilgrimages to the various old Bushman caves among the mountains in this part of the Colony and Kaffraria; and as their paintings are becoming obliterated very fast, it struck me that it would be as well to make copies of them before these interesting relics of an almost extinct race are entirely destroyed.… I have fortunately been able to procure many facsimile copies of hunting scenes, dances, fightings, etc., showing the modes of warfare, the chase, weapons, disguises, etc.

However, most of his copies, including watercolors and pencil tracings, were not published until 1930.

Stow was very selective, often ignoring hundreds of figures of animals and humans doing ordinary things and only copying some small part that he imagined to represent a ceremony. He also displayed typical Victorian prudishness, omitting some details presumably because they were unsuitable for publication. His method was to make a preliminary copy on rough paper, then trace from it onto art paper. Sometimes his lack of paper seems to have led him to reproduce together figures from different parts of a site or even from different shelters. The tracings on art paper were then colored, using as paints the original bushman pigments that he had picked up from the shelter floors. By the end of his life, he had amassed a dossier of seventy-four plates, and he tried to interpret them by asking bushman acquaintances what they meant.

Another pioneer copier was Joseph Orpen, a colonial administrator in the 1870s who published some of his drawings in color and who listened to bushmen talking about the art, especially one called Qing. Orpen’s work, in turn, acted as a great stimulus to Wilhelm Bleek, the German philologist who, in the 1870s, together