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he cultured discovery of Alpine engraved rocks, known all along by popular culture, first ap- peared in the literary field, and then in the academic and scientific ones. The earliest mentions refer to the Mt Bego complex, which was first cited in the manuscripts from the 15th to the 17th century, and in printed form in the first half of the 19th century (Foderé 1821, Gioffredo 1839). The descriptions are vague and fanciful, mostly due to the lack of interpretative tools rather than observational findings. Scientific research started in the second half of the 19th century when Matthew Moggridge published a brief report together with sketches of more than one hundred figures (Moggridge 1869). Some years later, Clugnet and Blanc presented more ac curate tracings. They anticipated the two main interpretive branches, one related to pastoralism (Clugnet 1877), and the other to the worship of a malevolent mountain deity (Blanc 1878) and to the “sacred mountain theory”. It has to be underlined the awareness of the distribution of figures only over a certain petrography (Clugnet), and the evident presence of separate and individual engraving acts (Blanc). In 1879 appears the work of the French archaeologist Emile Rivière, specialist in Palaeolithic, who reproduced with great precision more than four hundred figures, only partly published. Rivière proposed the first typological classification by dividing the engraved figures into three groups, and launched comparativism, suggesting comparisons with Morocco and the Canary Islands; he didn’t recognize the halberd, and nor dagger, figures. With the literate Emmanuel Celesia (1886), who suggested a very unlikely Phoenician origin of the engravers, the first Italian scholar appeared. Thanks to the local surveyors Degiovanni and Bacchialoni, he was the first to publish 6 8 engraved Fontanalba figures. In 1901 the long Arturo Issel’s text was published; Issel didn’t carry out researches in the area in first person, but carefully examined what had already been published and based his paper on early Bicknell’s works. He ascribed some of the engraved artefacts to the Early Bronze Age and suggested that the authors were “people dedicated to agriculture and pastoralism”, who attributed great importance to engraved figures with a “religious or political” meaning. Alongside the figurative strand, that of the cup-marks appeared in the same years, introduced in the alpine area by the Swiss archaeologists Fréderic Troyon (1854) and Ferdinand Keller (1870). Keller was inspired by the George Tate’s (1865) and Sir James Young Simpson’s (1867) works, where the text was accompanied by ac curate reproductions of cup-and-rings engraved rocks. In Italy the first publications of cup-marked stones are due to Giuseppe Piolti and Vincenzo Barelli (1880); they relate to the morainic amphitheatre of Rivoli and to the Val d’Intelvi. The research on non-figurative engravings was anticipated in the XVIII cent. by the studies on “rock-basons” - today considered to be of natural origin - published by the English antiquarians Borlase (1754) and Rooke (1782). As regards to documentation and interpretation, the research began and was fully formed in the third of the last decade of the 19th century. It is likely that for both figurative and non-figurative branches there was a common sparkle favoured by George Tate’s work: Ferdinand Keller cites him directly, and like him also Matthew Mog gridge was a member of the Geological Society of London, through which he was probably able to meet him or at least to know his work. All the various documentation techniques applied, such as sketches, paper reproduc- tions - rubbings or squeezes - and tracings, were methods borrowed from antique dealers and epigraphers. The publication of complementary documentation, together with the attentive iconographic and necessary obser- vational findings, have from the very beginning of the research constituted the essential characteristics of the path to be followed
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