The History Blog

Oxford University professor and Voltaire scholar Nicholas Cronk has uncovered 14 previously unknown letters by Voltaire written during his almost-three-year exile in England. Professor Cronk, director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation, found the letters while doing archival research in US libraries. Paul LeClerc, former president of the New York Public Library and a Voltaire scholar in his own right, asked Cronk to examine 11 letters by the French Enlightenment satirist they had recently purchased. Cronk found an additional two in the Morgan Library and Museum and one in the Columbia University library.

These letters shed new light on Voltaire’s time in England, confirming that he did indeed receive an impressive £200 pension from Robert Walpole’s government, a fact long debated by scholars, and underscoring Voltaire’s remarkable success at climbing the British social and literary ladder in a short period of time. He had arrived in England in 1726 a penniless poet and playwright with a knack for irritating the monarchy and aristocracy of France with his biting satire. He didn’t speak a word of English, and all he had to smooth his way was a letter of recommendation from the British ambassador to Paris. He learned fluent English in six months and was corresponding with royalty before a year had passed.

Professor Cronk said: “Voltaire spent two important but relatively undocumented years in England in his early thirties at a time when he was best known as a poet – he arrived with only a recommendation from the British Ambassador to Paris. While here, he was exposed to ideas of English writers and later took empiricism back to the Continent where it became the basis for the Enlightenment. These newly-discovered letters are therefore very interesting because they show how Voltaire’s close interaction with the English aristocracy exposed him to Enlightenment ideas and help us to piece together the nature of those interactions.”

One letter is from Voltaire to Lord Bathurst, a patron of the arts who often hosted great English thinkers at his manor, Richings, including Alexander Pope who wrote much of his translation of Homer there. In this letter Voltaire thanks Bathurst for “the freedom of your house and the many liberties I enjoyed in that fine library.” “This shows us one way in which Voltaire would have been exposed to so much of Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Swift, Pope and others – both by reading their books in the library at Richings and perhaps even by meeting contemporary English thinkers,” Professor Cronk explained.

Shortly after his arrival, in June of 1727, King George I died and his son assumed the throne as King George II. This was a fortunate changing of the guard for Voltaire, because the new king’s wife Queen Caroline was a strong supporter of the arts with a particular love of poetry. Grabbing the social climbing bull by the horns, Voltaire published an English translation of La Henriade, his 1723 epic poem about French King Henri IV, dedicating it to Queen Caroline. The poem sold well and solidified his patronage at the highest levels of British society.

Queen Caroline was a political ally of Sir Robert Walpole and may have played a part in securing Voltaire that £200 grant. One of the most notable of the newly discovered letters was written by Voltaire to the Treasury confirming receipt of the money. He signs it “Francis Voltaire,” a unique autograph that combines an anglicized version of his first name François with his famous pseudonym.

His time in England introduced him to ideas that he would advocate for the rest of his life, including freedom of speech, religious tolerance and constitutional monarchy. After his return to France in 1729, he would praise those ideals in his Letters Concerning the English Nation, a collection of essays published first in English in 1733 and then in French a year later. The French publication caused a scandal, getting the publisher sent to the Bastille and forcing Voltaire to flee yet again.

The 14 letters have been scanned, digitized and uploaded to Oxford’s Bodleian Library’s Electronic Enlightenment website, a treasure trove of correspondence from over 6,000 writers, philosophers, and political leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries. In collaboration with Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation, Electronic Enlightenment is working on digitizing the definitive complete collection of Voltaire’s writings.

It’s subscription only, I’m sad to say, but if you have access to an institutional login, you can view the Voltaire letters here.

On January 3rd, two vicious brutes broke into a retired vicar’s house in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, beat him up and tied him to a chair, then stole the most valuable pieces from his collection of paintings and antique furniture as selected by a knowledgeable accomplice via iPhone. Before leaving they destroyed the rest of the art and antiques with a hatchet.

Authorities are keeping mum on the details while the investigation is ongoing — the vicar’s name is not being released because he is terrified of drawing attention to himself — but we know that among the stolen pieces are paintings by 18th-century Venetian master Canaletto. The total value of the stolen works is well into the millions of dollars. No word on what the rest of the vicar’s collection was worth before they took a hatchet to it, but he’s been an avid collector and a fixture at auctions for decades.

A source said: “This robbery was well-planned and ruthlessly executed. They had possibly been watching the house for months, watching the major art sales where the victim was well known.[...]

The Irish Daily Mirror understands the two men worked with a third party to assist them with the robbery. A source said: “They were on the phone to someone outside the house and from what I understand they used a hi-tech phone to show the third party which pieces were in the house.

They wanted to know which were most valuable because those are the ones that were stolen. There was a lot taken, an awful lot.

“This was a horrendous experience for the victim and it was carefully planned and executed.”

The thieves also stole the victim’s contact books which had personal information about a number of other high end art collectors, including scions of the Guinness family and Edward Haughey, Baron Ballyedmond, the richest man in Northern Ireland. All the people in the book have been alerted to the theft and advised to increase their security.

Two similar thefts took place in the same county two years ago. The Police Service of Northern Ireland and Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Siochana, are investigating any connection between the crimes.

David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of private equity company The Carlyle Group and an avid history buff, has donated $7.5 million to the Trust for the National Mall to repair the Washington Monument. In December Congress allocated $7.5 million to fund the repair on the condition that the National Park Service raise matching private funds. Rubenstein’s donation thus not only grants the restoration efforts a hefty sum in itself, but also assures the Congressional funding.

The 555-foot obelisk, built in 1884 to honor the first president of the United States, was damaged by the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the capital on August 23, 2011. Early assessments found a large four-foot-long, one-inch-wide crack and a number of smaller cracks in the monument, so for safety reasons the monument was immediately closed to the public. Later more detailed assessments found the damage was even worse than they first realized.

According
 to 
a
 report 
released 
by 
the 
National
 Park
 Service, 
inspectors 
found
 numerous
 cracked
 and
 chipped
 stones,
 including 
six
 large 
cracks 
that
 extend
 through 
the 
marble 
exterior 
of 
the 
Monument’s
 pyramidion,
 that
 have 
left 
the 
127
 year‐old 
structure
 extremely
 vulnerable.

 The
 Monument
 also 
suffered
 missing 
mortar,
 the
 displacement 
of
 components 
of
 the 
lightning
 protection
 system,
 and
 damage
 to 
the
 elevator 
counter
 weight 
frame.


The $15 million will go to repairing all of the direct earthquake damage. It’s not enough, however, to cover some of the other issues plaguing the monument, like extensive water damage to the interior from the cracks in the marble and lost mortar at the peak of the obelisk. Some of the marble panels up top were cracked all the way through. The monument also needs structural reinforcement to protect the tallest obelisk in the world against future freak earthquakes, so here’s hoping there are more billionaire history buffs lying around somewhere.

The Washington Monument continues to be closed to the public and it looks like it will remain closed for the next two years. The Park Service is taking bids from contractors now with the aim of starting repair work by the end of August. They expect the repair to take 10 months to a year to complete.

The National Park Service website has an incredible photo gallery of the earthquake damage and the assessments done by civil engineers from the Difficult Access Team of contractors Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. (WJE).

The Difficult Access Team is my new obsession. The WJE team did preliminary damage assessments of the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial and Lincoln Memorial the day after the earthquake. That work was done visually — by helicopter for the top of the obelisk — but they had to return to the Washington Monument to do an in depth investigation by rappelling off the top. These are engineers, mind you. They could spend their lives in an office drafting things, but instead they badassedly rappel down a 555-foot marble needle. Two of the four are women, so yay sisterhood! Here’s one of those women, engineer Emma Cardini, starting her descent on September 28, 2011:

Here’s more dizzying video taken from the helmet of WJE engineer Erik Stohn:

If you’re wondering why they had to rappel this time instead of using a helicopter or scaffolding, according to NPS Acting Chief of Resource Management Jennifer Talken-Spaulding a detailed damaged assessment requires hands-on (literally) work. You have to be able to touch the stone, tap it, listen to the sounds it makes, see the condition of the mortar and marble. They also had to remove spalls, chunks of stone that have come loose and could pose a serious hazard to people on the ground. You have to do that by hand. Scaffolding takes a long time to build, and they wanted a thorough assessment of the damage before the cold winter set in.

This is what it looked like at the 500-foot level observatory when the earthquake hit. The shaking starts at 1:45, but watch the whole thing to see the security guard just hanging out and tourists walking around casually before things suddenly get hairy.

For more videos of the earthquake, damage and repair work on the Washington Monument, please visit the National Park Service’s videos page. That 4-foot crack up top looks truly awful from the inside. You can see the light shining through it and it’s huge.

The National Park Service has carefully dismantled and removed an 1850′s bathroom from the Dunleith Historical Inn in Natchez, Mississippi. One of only 20 antique bathrooms remaining in the United States, the Dunleith lavatory had hot and cold running water, a bathtub, a shower and a commode that were all part of a single large piece of furniture. The shower wouldn’t be out of place in a luxury home today; it has a 10-inch rain showerhead. An immense 400-pound zinc-lined cistern once contained the hot water for the system. (There was also a separate wash table with a marble sink which isn’t in the bathroom anymore, but the NPS hope to secure nonetheless to complete the set.)

The bathroom is thought to have been installed in 1859 by Alfred Vidal Davis who bought the Greek revival mansion that year. When the National Park Service workers were removing the bathroom, they found a packing slip from New Orleans plumbing company Price & Coulon. NPS historian Jeff Mansell believes the entire system was available for purchase from a catalog, hence the packing slip.

It was installed on the third floor at the top of a forbiddingly steep staircase. Pipes carried water from the laundry room on the first floor where it was heated by boiler up to cisterns in the attic. When someone turned on the faucets or flushed the toilet, the cisterns drained down to the third floor. The toilet waste would then be piped to a septic tank that was also connected to the more traditional outhouses on the property.

That inconvenient third floor location saved its life, because bathrooms are gutted all the time but this one was so out of the way that subsequent owners never bothered renovating it. For the past decade it’s been used as a storage room. Now the Dunleith Historical Inn is renovating the space to make more room for paying guests. Recognizing the rarity and importance of the bathroom, they decided to donate the fixtures to the National Park Service.

The NPS accepted with alacrity, but removing the fixtures was an engineering challenge (LiveScience has a photo gallery of the process). Construction crews had to remove the commode, shower and bathtub separately, then build a ramp and use a forklift to get that 400-pound cistern out of the house.

For now the parts will be stored, but the NPS plans to install them in another Greek revival antebellum mansion: Melrose, a National Park Service property that dates to the 1840s. Melrose had some sort of washroom facility in the 1850s, but only the pipes remain so we can’t know what kind of fixtures were originally installed. The Dunleith bathroom will in all likelihood be installed in one of two dressing rooms at Melrose that are currently off-limit to guests.

Once the bathroom is installed, Mansell said, the room will be open for public viewing. He said he believes people will be surprised at the plumbing technology that was used in the bathroom.

“I don’t think (people) think of systems like this existing in the 19th century,” he said. [...]

[John Holyoak, manager of Dunleith Historical Inn,] said moving the bathroom’s contents from Dunleith will allow the rare technology to be preserved and displayed.

“If we leave that bathroom where it is, no one will ever see it,” he said. “The benefit of having it moved is that it will be set up as a public display and tourists will be able to see something extremely unique.”

Sign me up. I have had a passion for historical bathrooms since I was a little kid squatting on the Roman latrines at Ostia.

A team of archaeologists from the University of Birmingham have discovered new evidence of huge mass graves on the former site of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka.

Since the Nazis razed the camp in November of 1943 after a prisoner revolt, leaving little visible evidence of the 800,000+ Jews they’d slaughtered in just over a year of operation, Holocaust deniers have claimed that Treblinka wasn’t a death camp at all, but rather a transit station where prisoners were sorted before being shipped off to other labor camps. (Interestingly, that’s just what the SS told new arrivals before making them undress and sending them to the “showers” for “delousing.”)

This is the first coordinated scientific attempt to locate graves at Treblinka. Led by forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls, the research team used ground-penetrating radar and aerial and satellite imagery to look for burial sites without breaking ground, out of respect for Jewish Halacha law which forbids disturbing burial sites.

Sturdy Colls said: “All the history books state that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis but the survey has demonstrated that simply isn’t the case.”

She added: “I’ve identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable in size, and very deep, one in particular is 26 by 17 metres.”

Dug by an enormous excavator from the quarry at the nearby Treblinka I forced labour camp, each of these large pits are thought to contain the charred remains of thousands of bodies. Some of the pits were used for burial, others as cremation pits. In March 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the camp and ordered that all the bodies be cremated. The burial pits were opened and the corpses burned on cremation grates built out of railway tracks. There are pictures extant of the resulting ash heaps.

BBC Radio 4 will air a program following the Colls’ work at Treblinka. The Hidden Graves of the Holocaust first airs on Monday, January 23 at 8:00 PM.

A more personal witness to the horrors of the Holocaust can be found in a remarkable book recently published by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum: The Sketchbook from Auschwitz. In 1947, Józef Odi, a former prisoner who was working as a watchman on the Auschwitz grounds, found 32 sketches on 22 pages rolled into a bottle and hidden in the foundations of a barracks near the gas chambers and crematoria.

These incredible works of art, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure, are the only drawings made in Birkenau to depict the extermination of Jews. They are signed with the initials MM, so we don’t even know the name of the artist. We know from some of the depictions that they were made in 1943 and that the artist was immensely courageous to make these detailed drawings recording the systematic mass-murder of Jews, including badge numbers of functionary prisoners, license plates of trucks and train cars.

This is the first time all of the MM sketches have been published.

University of London paleontologist Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang was looking through an old cabinet in the British Geological Survey archives for some carboniferous fossil-wood specimens. He opened a drawer labeled “unregistered fossil plants” and found hundreds of glass slides of thin, polished fossil plant sections. He fished out a slide and examined it with a flashlight, finding to his great shock the signature of one C. Darwin, Esq. That slide turned out to be a piece of fossilized wood Darwin had collected during his now-iconic voyage on the HMS Beagle in 1834.

The cabinet contained 314 slides of fossils collected by botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin’s best friend who had helped him classify the specimens he had gathered in South America and the Galápagos Islands. Several other slides bear Darwin’s name, and experts think that some of the unlabeled specimens were also prepared by Darwin.

The collection also includes specimens collected by Hooker himself on his travels, pieces from the private cabinet of Reverend John Stevens Henslow, Darwin’s Cambridge mentor and Hooker’s father-in-law, and some very early rock sections made by pioneering geologist William Nicol in the late 1820s. Nicol first devised the technique of affixing a crystal or rock section to a slide then grinding it down until it was thin enough to view through a microscope just a few years earlier in 1815. Some of these slides are huge compared to their descendants today, six inches long and a tenth of an inch thick.

J.D. Hooker had first assembled the slide collection when he worked for the British Geological Survey from February 1846 to October 1847. At that time the Survey didn’t have a formal registration system for its specimens. One would be implemented in 1848 but by then Hooker was no longer in their employ or even in the country. He was traveling through India and the Himalayas, doubtless collecting more specimens, so was not available to help the BGS properly catalogue his own contributions to their archive. By the time he got back in 1851, the BGS was in the process of moving its collection to new offices.

In 1851, the “unregistered” fossils were moved to the Museum of Practical Geology in Piccadilly before being transferred to the South Kensington’s Geological Museum in 1935 and then to the British Geological Survey’s headquarters near Nottingham 50 years later, the university said.

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken “a long time” to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said.

A core of 33 important slides from the collection have been photographed and uploaded to the British Geological Survey’s website. More will follow until the entire collection is online.

If you’d like to know more about Darwin and Hooker’s work and friendship, the Darwin Correspondence Project has almost 1500 letters between Darwin and Hooker available online.

Archaeologists from the University of Basel in Switzerland have discovered the tomb of a woman with no connection to the royal family in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. This is the first tomb of a non-royal woman ever found in the Valley of the Kings.

According to an inscription inside the tomb, her name was Nehmes Bastet and she was a singer for deity Amon Ra in the Temple of Karnak during the 22nd Dynasty (945-712 B.C.). She may have been the daughter of the High Priest of Amon, which would explain how she secured such a primo location for eternity.

At the time of her death, Egypt was ruled by Libyan kings, but the high priests who ruled Thebes, which is now within the city of Luxor, were independent. Their authority enabled them to use the royal cemetery for family members, according to [Mansour Boraiq, the Antiquities' Ministry top official for Luxor].

The unearthing marks the 64th tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb was discovered entirely by accident. The University of Basel team’s remit is to clean and document some of the less glamorous and therefore less studied tombs. While cleaning near the tomb of Thuthmosis III (discovered a hundred years ago), they found a shaft with a chamber at the bottom. Inside the chamber was an intact wooden sarcophagus painted black and decorated with hieroglyphics and a wooden plaque engraved with Nehmes Bastet’s name and titles.

The coffin will be opened this week. Egyptologists expect (probably because of the weight distribution) to find a mummy covered with a cartonnage (plastered layers of linen) mask.

Ahram Online says the burial chamber contains a “treasured collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts.” There are no specifics on what these artifacts are, but they apparently were used to determine that the tomb itself pre-dates the 22nd Dynasty burial. It was originally cut during the 18th Dynasty (1550-1292 B.C.), the dynasty of superstars like Tutankhamun and Nefertiti. We don’t know yet what exactly allowed them to date the tomb or who the original resident might have been.

Interesting side note to this story: several Egyptology bloggers first heard rumors that the University of Basel had found a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings around the time of the Egyptian revolution last year. Security police had been withdrawn from the Valley of the Kings, so there was nobody on site to deter and capture the looters who would inevitably descend on the site like locusts should they catch wind of a new tomb.

Bloggers coordinated with Dr. Thomas Schuler of Blue Shield, an international organization for the protection of cultural heritage during emergency situations, to warn the University of Basel team and to publicly dismiss the rumored find as just a secondary shaft to a pre-existing tomb. Thanks to them, researchers were able to do their thing without dangerous interference.

Amidst thousands of drawings of mechanical inventions, artillery, anatomy, the natural world, etc. made by Leonardo da Vinci and collected in the Codex Atlanticus are some fragments of a design that nobody paid much attention to for 500 years. In 1978, Da Vinci scholar Carlo Pedretti paid attention and identified the drawing as a handbag designed by Leonardo da Vinci around 1497.

Agnese Sabato and Alessandro Vezzosi of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci recently reassembled the design from the fragments. Vezzosi thinks Leonardo made several drawings of the same bag but they’ve been lost.

As a tribute to the city of Florence, a city that has long been famous for its exquisite leather work, fashion house Gherardini has brought Leonardo’s handbag to life. Designer Carla Braccialini designed the “Pretiosa” (meaning “precious” and yes, I am saying it like Gollum) bag based on Leonardo’s drawing, and artisans made it by hand using luxury materials like embroidered calf leather and an embossed brass handle.

Here is an all too short video of a craftsman making the “Pretiosa”:

Functional and beautiful, creative and provocative, the bag would have certainly stood out among Renaissance fashion.

“While the shape recalls the lectern in “The Annunciation,” painted by Leonardo in the workshop of Verrocchio, its patterns feature rotating spirals and floral motifs, scrolls and foliage in metamorphosis,” Vezzosi said.

Boasting a unique closing system, the bag was designed at the end of Leonardo’s first Milanese period, around 1497. At that time, the artist was painting the tapestries in the Last Supper and knots designs in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco.

“Pretiosa” was on display for just three days (January 11-13) at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the first art school in Europe which was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Giorgio Vasari in 1563. Gherardini has made only 99 Preciouses. They will theoretically be sold in Gherardini boutiques starting in March, but I highly doubt anybody walking in off the street will be able to get their mitts on one.

This wasn’t Leonardo’s only foray into fashion design. Several of his forays into clothing and accessory design have survived, as have his writings on the subject. He had strong opinions on the fashions of his era, condemning excessive ornamentation, overly tight clothes and shoes.

An appreciation for fashion is not Gherardini’s sole connection to the Renaissance genius. Lisa Gherardini, born to a decayed aristocratic Florentine family in 1479, married successful silk merchant Francesco Del Giocondo when she was 15. In 1503, Francesco commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of her. It took him so long to paint it that he officially gave up the commission in 1506, although he kept working on it for the rest of his life.

After his death in 1519, the painting was bought by King Francis I of France. Now Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, aka la Gioconda, aka Madonna Lisa, aka Monna Lisa, aka the Mona Lisa, smiles serenely at dense crowds of Louvre visitors. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, her relatives founded the Gherardini fashion house.

The New York Public Library has digitized and uploaded a gallery of astronomy drawings made in the late 1800s by French artist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and they are gorgeous.

A staunch Republican (of the French variety, not the US variety), Trouvelot fled France when he was just 24 years old after Louis-Napoléon’s December 2, 1851 coup d’état. By the time President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had crowned himself Napoleon III exactly one year later, Trouvelot was living in the United States with his family. He settled in Massachusetts in 1855, earning an income as an artist.

A member of the Boston Society of Natural History, Trouvelot was an amateur entomologist with a particular interest in silkworms. That interest was more than a minor hobby. By 1865, he had a million Polyphemus moth caterpillars living in bushes in his backyard under a vast net. His aim was to improve the health of the disease-prone caterpillars so their silk production would improve. In aid of this, he had the brilliant idea to breed them with a hardier creature: the gypsy moth.

Even in 1868, the gypsy moth already had a reputation as a destructive invasive species. Trouvelot was convinced he could control them, though, so in the winter of 1868/69, he returned from Europe with a clutch of gypsy moth eggs which he put in a tree in the backyard thinking his netting would keep them from spreading. Nature lol’d and with a soft breeze blew the eggs into nearby woods. Trouvelot tried to track them all down but of course couldn’t. He alerted his neighbors and entomologists but none of them did anything.

And thus the gypsy moth was introduced to the US. By 1886, his suburban Boston neighborhood was saturated with the beasties. By 1890, the entire state was. The federal and state governments tried to eradicate the pest, but failed miserably. By 1898 the moths had spread south to Virginia and west to the Great Lakes. Today gypsy moths live all over the contiguous US and cause an estimated $868 million of agricultural damage a year.

After this mess Trouvelot decided to direct his scientific interests to non-entomological pursuits. He had already begun to draw astronomical phenomena like meteor showers and auroras in the late 1860s. Joseph Winlock, director of the Harvard College Observatory, admired his illustrations and hired Trouvelot to work for the observatory. Space photography had existed for a couple of decades by then, but although the technology was constantly improving, drawings were still considered the most accurate depictions of astronomical phenomena.

For the next few years Trouvelot made hundred of sketches of what he saw through the observatory’s 15-inch refractor telescope. In 1875 he published a discovery of his own: veiled spots, grey patches that look like shadows on the surface of the sun. He then moved on to other observatories, including the Washington Observatory and the University of Virginia’s.

In 1881, he selected 15 out of his thousands of astronomy drawings to be published in a book using then-cutting edge chromolithography technology, a color printing process that made color illustrations cheap and plentiful. It’s those chromolithographs that the New York Public Library has digitized. Trouvelet described his work thus:

“With a view to making these observations more generally useful, I was led…to prepare, from this collection of drawings, a series of astronomical pictures, which were intended to represent the celestial phenomena as they appear to the trained eye and to an experienced draughtsman through the great modern telescopes provided with the most delicate instrumental appliances…. While my aim in this work has been to combine scrupulous fidelity and accuracy in the details, I have also endeavored to preserve the natural elegance and the delicate outlines peculiar to the objects depicted….”

Goal achieved, I’d say.

Compare his illustrations to period photography of astronomical phenomena in this NYPL gallery. Trouvelot’s work is far more accurate as well as incredibly beautiful.

Archaeologists have discovered 3,000 rock paintings dating from the first century to the twentieth in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH) announced Friday. The art was found at 40 different sites in the desert region between August and October of last year, but the Institute waited to reveal the find until laboratory analyses confirmed the ages of the pictographs.

Guanajuato has been a rich source of rock art discoveries since the 1980s. In an attempt to locate and document as many of the painted sites as possible, INAH developed the Rupestral Art Project of the Victoria River Basin which has sent a team of researchers into the area for four consecutive years. This season’s find more than doubles the known rock art sites in the region from 30 to 70.

[T]he oldest images refer to rites of passage, healing, prayers for rain and mountain worship, and were created by ancient hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the area during the first centuries A.D.

These paintings, with yellow, red and black the predominating colors, generally represent human figures with headdresses, robes and shields, as well as some as yet unidentified instruments. Often in hunting and battle scenes they carry bows and arrows.

“A great diversity of animals is also to be seen, chiefly deer, canines, insects like centipedes and spiders, a great variety of birds, generally with their wings outspread, and radiating circles that probably represent the sun,” Viramontes said.

The expert said that the ancient hunter-gatherers who “created images on rockfaces were doing more than just leaving an imprint of their collective memory of historic, climatic and ritual occurrences – they painted the exposed fronts and sheltered backs of boulders as points of contact between the material and spiritual world.”

The later pictographs also include much religious symbolism, although a Christian-influenced variety courtesy of the Spanish conquistadors. The cave paintings that date to Mexico’s colonial period (1650–1810)‎ include images of crosses, shrines and altars. They were made using white pigments characteristic of the indigenous Otomi people who settled in arid northeastern Guanajuato starting in the 16th century.

There are also images painted in the 19th century by local ranchers. Crosses, altars and human characters predominate. The ranchers used rough strokes of red pigment as opposed to the Otomi white. They also dressed their human images in the kinds of clothes that they wore at the time: baggy pants and hats.

The 20th century paintings are of cups and crosses. Archaeologists believe they were painted during the Cristero War (1926-1929), a rebellion against the Mexican government sparked by by President Plutarco Elías Calles’s strict enforcement of anti-clerical articles in the Mexican Constitution of 1917. According to the locals, the cave in question was used as shelter by people of various religions who also performed rituals there.