the map of prehistoric art. For example, it was in 1903 that the first scientific discovery of a site of Levantine art in Spain was discovered—red paintings of three deer and aurochs at Roca dels Moros at Calapatá, Teruel—by Juan Cabré y Aguiló, a photographer. He did not dare publish his findings until 1907, mindful of the ridicule and furor caused by Altamira in 1880, but eventually his find aroused national interest. The same year, the Roca dels Moros at Cogul, Lérida, was reported by the local parish priest, Ramón Huguet, and published in 1908, although the locals had always known of them and attributed them, like all ancient things, to the Moors, who had brought so much culture to Spain in earlier times. Elsewhere in Europe, the rock art of valcamonica in the Italian Alps was first pointed out by a shepherd in 1914.

One might think that the rock-art map of Europe was now well established, but not only do new decorated caves continue to turn up every year in France and Spain, and new petroglyph sites in the Alps and elsewhere, but thousands of petroglyphs have been discovered in the far north of Norway (especially around Alta) since 1973 while major collections of hundreds of open-air Paleolithic engravings and petroglyphs have been found in Spain and Portugal since 1980 and especially in the 1990s.

In Asia, Thailand became of interest to the rock-art world thanks to a French military surveyor, L.L. Lunet de Lajonquière, who was in the area from 1903 to 1909. His descriptive records, published in 1912, include references to painted rock-art sites, notably Khao Kian (Mountain of Paintings), a shallow cave containing geometric designs and naturalistic animals. More sites were found in the 1920s and later. In China, an engraving in Hong Kong had been mentioned in newspapers in 1819, but the first real research in that country, which took place in 1915, consisted of work on the engravings in Fujian Province after Professor Hua Zhongjin was informed of them by villagers. In 1927, the Swedish archaeologist Bergman found engravings in Inner Mongolia and filled them with white powder to take photographs.

Amazingly, it was not until the 1980s that rock-art research really got under way in earnest in China and that the outside world learned of the country’s enormous wealth in this regard. Major discoveries have continued there—for example, scores of rock-art sites with thousands of figures were discovered in Tibet only during the 1990s. Meanwhile, in India, research flourished throughout the century, with the result that we now know of more than 1,000 rock shelters with paintings in over 150 sites; there is rock art in almost all the states of India.

In Australia, the first clues that the rock art might be really ancient came in 1929 when excavations of the Devon Downs shelter on the Murray River exposed engraved art on the rock face, the earliest of which was associated with debris four meters below the surface. In the last few decades of the twentieth century the dates were pushed back—for example, 13,000 years for engravings at the Early Man Shelter in Queensland. Claims have been made for an age of more than 40,000 years for organic material trapped in varnish on top of simple petroglyphs at Wharton Hill and Panaramittee South in South Australia, although the validity of such dates from organic material in an “open system” remains highly uncertain and controversial. In some areas, such as the Kimberley, more than 100 new sites per year were found in the 1990s, and a large number of previously unsuspected decorated caves were also discovered.

In North America, there was relatively little interest in rock art until julian steward wrote a work on the subject that was published by the University of California at Berkeley in 1929. He was the first person to use the terms “petroglyph” and “pictograph,” and he shunned the use of ethnographic data as speculative, preferring to focus on defining a series of rock art “areas.” In more recent years, it has been found that the New World has one of the world’s richest and most diverse bodies of prehistoric art, with whole new areas still being put on the rock-art map, especially in vast territories like Brazil, where, for example, the hundreds of decorated rock shelters of the Piauí region have become known only since the 1970s.

The continent on which rock art was perhaps the most transformed in the course of the twentieth century is Africa. In East Africa, the first