not realize they were prehistoric. As for Spain’s megalithic art, the first description of decoration in a stone monument is that of Santa Cruz, Cangas de Onis, in 1871, followed by others in the 1870s. In Brittany, the earliest known drawings of the decorated stones called Les Pierres Plates and La Table des Marchands were done in 1814 by Maudet de Penhoët. Many such sites were also reported in Ireland in the nineteenth century, including Loughcrew in the 1860s.

In britain, stones called Calderstones, in a chambered tomb in Liverpool, were noted in 1825, although these sandstone blocks were already well known and had been referred to in a boundary dispute as early as 1568—however, there is no indication that the spirals, cupmarks, and feet pecked into the slabs were aboveground at that time, as the stones’ decoration was first described in 1825. The decorated stones of Orkney were also discovered by excavation in the nineteenth century. The first person to describe English rock art was George Tate in 1864—he mentioned fifty-five sites. Sir James Simpson, Queen Victoria’s physician in Scotland, wrote a book called Archaic Sculpturings (1867) about some Scottish cup and ring marks.

The Lake Onega engravings in Russia were discovered in 1848, and their earliest (fanciful) publication by P. Schwed was in 1850. Other nineteenth-century discoveries were made in the Urals and Siberia. In Scandinavia, some copies of rock carvings were made by Carl George Brunius in the early nineteenth century, though it was only after the clergyman Axel Emanuel Holmberg began his work in 1843 that really useful catalogs of the art were put together. Homberg’s Skandinaviens hällristningar (Rock Carvings of Scandinavia), published in 1848, was illustrated with 165 drawings, only a small part of his collection. The most outstanding work is considered to be that of a Danish art teacher, Lauritz Baltzer, who published two volumes of prints, Hällristningar fran Bohuslän, I, 1881–1890 and II, 1891–1908, that contained 248 drawings and descriptions, all of great accuracy. Plaster casts of rock engravings were made as early as the mid-nineteenth century by the great Danish prehistorian jens jacob worsaae.

Brunius was one of the greatest pioneers of rock-art recording, though his name remains largely unknown outside Scandinavia. Born in 1792 in the parsonage of Tanum in western Sweden to a clergyman father who had an interest in antiquities, Brunius was surrounded throughout his childhood by the wealth of ancient monuments and rock art in the region and showed early talent as a draftsman. He carried out fieldwork in Bohuslän in the three summers from 1815 to 1817, which led him to write a book, Hällristningslära (A Doctrine of Rock Art), in 1818 that was translated into French and titled Rapport succinct sur les hiéroglyphes trouvés sur les rochers de la Province de Bohus (A Short Report on the Carvings Found on the Rocks of the Province of Bohus) but for financial reasons was never printed—the many plates made it very expensive. Nonetheless, it comprised the first professional record of sixty-five rock-art sites in his part of the world. The drawings are preserved in Stockholm’s Topographical Archives.

Brunius thought of petroglyphs as hieroglyphics and could see that they were older than the alphabet, so he assumed that they were older than runes—especially as they are not mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. Since the petroglyphs were located far from the present coast, he thought they might be several thousand years old if they had originally been cut next to the shore (presumably the dominance of ship motifs suggested this idea as well as his observation of several ancient beaches and inland shell middens). Brunius argued like a natural scientist and even used weathering processes as indicators of antiquity. However, he had no comparable studies from which to work: for his somewhat simple narrative interpretations (seeing the figures as memorials, a kind of picture writing, depicting fighting, embarkation, etc.) he used classical sources such as Tacitus and Pytheas and also the emerging ethnography of the Eskimo, for example, by drawing on knowledge of Greenland canoes and some Siberian carvings on rocks published earlier by von Strahlenberg.

Brunius also left a detailed account of his working methods, and those methods reveal what a true pioneer he was. He proclaimed that