careful and true observations create better conditions for interpretation.

The earth on the carvings was taken away, the mosses were scratched off by an iron scraper, the water was led another way and the bedrock was cleaned and washed somewhere. If the figures were small and unclear, I had to—in order to be sure—visit the place at that hour of the day when the sun was shining so that a separation of the figures was possible by light and shadow. It is possible to have the same effect after the sun set by the help of a lantern. If the observation was difficult I had to revisit the place. On these occasions chalk was brought to make contours. It was also rewarding to use the finger tips to know if a line was natural or artificial.

To produce his drawings, Brunius laid a grid system over the rock surface and copied the figures onto a corresponding grid paper, all within a controlled scale. Figures that were hard to identify were visited several times in different conditions—as mentioned in the above quotation, in oblique sunlight, by night lantern, or after a rain. The figures were marked on the rock with chalk and drawn onto paper with pencil in such a way that a darker line denoted a deeper carving. Finally, he also discussed the location, age, and significance of the figures; noted differences in their condition, from intact to almost totally disappeared; and looked at the sites’ environs, their setting in the landscape, and the presence of monuments nearby.

Since Brunius was such a pioneer, he had very little comparative material to help him with interpretation. He also had a moral problem in his documentation—should the impressive sexual organs of the male figures be depicted or not? He therefore referred to other tribes such as the Lapps or the Huns as the creators of the rude customs shown on the rocks and claimed that the original Nordic people were above this cultural level.

The bombshell of Paleolithic (Ice Age) art came after decades of sporadic and misunderstood finds. Its existence was first established and accepted through the discovery, in the early 1860s, of engraved and carved bones and stones in a number of caves and rock shelters in southwestern France, particularly by édouard lartet and his English associate henry christy. These objects were found with Paleolithic stone and bone tools and the bones of Ice Age animals, which proved their great age—in particular, the famous engraving from la madeleine of a mammoth on a piece of mammoth tusk. There followed a kind of “gold rush,” with people plundering likely sites for ancient art treasures.

Some French scholars had noticed art on cave walls in the 1860s and 1870s but had not realized its age or significance. The pioneer who did make the crucial mental leap was a Spanish landowner, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who noticed in 1879 that the bison figures painted on the ceiling of the cave of altamira, near the north coast of Cantabria, were closely similar in style to the figures in Paleolithic portable art. Unfortunately, most of the archaeological establishment refused to take his published views seriously, dismissing him as naive or a fraud. One prehistorian who did accept Altamira, however, was edouard piette, who, in the late 1880s, was to find the famous painted pebbles in the cave of le mas d’azil in the French Pyrenees, a discovery the establishment found equally hard to swallow. One of the doubts raised about Altamira was that the cave was too humid and the rock too friable to have preserved painting for so long, but the stratigraphic position of the Azilian pebbles finally proved that ocher could adhere to rock for millennia.

It was in southwestern France once again that the final breakthrough occurred when engravings were found, in 1895, in a gallery of the cave of La Mouthe in the Dordogne region. Since the gallery was blocked by Paleolithic deposits, it was obvious that the engravings must be of the same age. Other discoveries soon followed in other caves in southern France, culminating in those of Les Combarelles and Font de Gaume in 1901, which served to at last establish the authenticity of Paleolithic cave art.

The Twentieth Century: A Splintering of Approaches

In the twentieth century, the discoveries made involved not just individual sites but whole classes of art and brought more countries onto