red pigment of “men, women and animals, weapons, utensils, symbols of religion, etc.” In the Sorhow ghat cave he found pieces of haematite and a pointed pencil of chalk. On grinding these up with oil—in what may be the first piece of experimental archaeology related to rock art—Cockburn was able to produce colors exactly like those used in the cave drawings. He did not consider them to be more than six or seven centuries old. In 1899, he published an account of all his finds and compared the drawings with those found in Australia, South Africa, and North and South America. He made tracings of several pictures using paper made transparent by petroleum.

In the Americas, major developments took place in the north—as the West was won and frontiers were pushed back, like in Australia—but comparatively little happened further south. In Mexico, for example, nobody in the nineteenth century seems to have taken much notice of the great murals of Baja California until 1882. Shortly afterward, in 1888–1890, Teobert Maler visited the maya cave of Loltun, in Yucatán, and made drawings and photographs of its rock engravings and paintings.

Historical accounts from 1816 describe “human footprints” found in limestone at the edge of the Mississippi at St. Louis. Three years later, the footprints were removed to Indiana by Rappites, members of a German religious group. In an intriguing echo of the early missionaries’ interpretation of such prints, they were associated with the Angel Gabriel. Some early visitors, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the famous American explorer and ethnologist, discussed whether these were actual footprints in solidified mud or petroglyphs, but a geologist eventually proved that they were definitely the work of humans. In 1853, Schoolcraft published a drawing given to him by Chingwauk, his informant in the Agawa Bay area of Lake Superior—he had hired Chingwauk in 1822 to teach him the meaning of pictures on birch-bark scrolls and stone—of pictures from two rock-art sites, one on the south shore and the other on the north shore (which he called Inscription Rock); Schoolcraft also supplied a reading.

On the Northwest coast, petroglyph carving continued in British Columbia until the nineteenth century. Newcombe learned this fact from Indian informants near Beecher Bay in the 1860s and 1870s while anthropologist Franz Boas observed an actual petroglyph carving ceremony among the Kwakiutl in 1895.

The earliest major American pioneer was Garrick Mallery, a U.S. army colonel in command of Fort Rice on the upper Missouri River who retired in 1879 and collected and interpreted a vast amount of material. His first account, Pictographs of the North American Indians (1866), contained only 21 pages on rock art, but he followed this volume with his definitive work, Picture-Writing of the American Indians (1893), which contained no fewer than 150 pages on the subject. In it, he noted that “one of the curious facts in connection with petroglyphs is the meager notice taken of them by explorers and even by residents other than the Indians, who are generally reticent concerning them” (p. 36).

It was in Europe, however, that by far the most momentous developments in the study of prehistoric art were to occur during the nineteenth century as the existence of paleolithic portable and parietal art was discovered, authenticated, and eventually accepted. In parallel with those events, though, more-recent rock art continued to be found or studied. For example, the French doctor François-Emmanuel Fodéré mentioned the petroglyphs of the Vallée des Merveilles (Monte Bego) in 1821 when referring to Hannibal’s passing through the region—he thought them to be blocks prepared for the construction of a monument that the makers never had the time to erect. There were several studies of these engravings in the 1860s and 1870s before two major figures came on the scene: in 1877, Emile Rivière was the first to recognize that the petroglyphs were prehistoric, and the English amateur botanist Clarence Bicknell carried out the first systematic studies of Monte Bego from 1881 onward.

The earliest mention of spain’s famous Levantine rock paintings came in 1892 in a book called Los toros de La Losilla by J.E. Marconell, which concerned the white rock paintings of the Sierra de Albarracín, although the author did