Greene, "simply places to deposit the remains of the dead". In adherence to the second biblical commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image", the earliest settlers sought to avoid the worship of ancestors through stone images. In addition they sought to avoid use of the traditional Catholic cross, while table type tombs were seen as too elaborate, practically and aesthetically. The graves had little order to their plotting, and were either unmarked, or were marked a by wooden sign or an uncut rock, with only very few having a simple greenstone or carved headstone, usually with no decorations or ornamentation. The earliest known stonecutters who carved gravestones in New England were George Griswold and his uncle Matthew who settled in Windsor, Connecticut around 1640. Matthew carved the oldest known grave marker in the New World, a table tomb monument made of Windsor brownstone for the Rev. Ephriam Huit dated 1644 which stands in the Palisado Cemetery in Windsor today. Both Matthew and George Griswold would continue carving both walled tomb style markers, and normal headstones until the end of the 17th century. When inscriptions began to be used, they are at first brief, factual and typically carved with "interruptive punctuation", that is an interpunct (raised period), between each word. Full names, kinship, age at death and the year of death are given, while the dating of placement of the stone itself is also present; typically they were commissioned and erected within a year of the burial. The headstones had become increasingly elaborate the mid-17th century, and is characterized by stonework imagery describing the nature and frequency of death in dark, bleak and often bitter imagery. Soon after, a significant number contain epitaphs, the tone of which is often correlated with the severity or bleakness of the design. In 1980, the historian Peter Benes described the imagery in a Plymouth County graveyard as containing "menacing stares, impish smiles, and enigmatic facial contortions combine with totally abstract effigies to stop the modern viewer in his tracks, while revealing little of their significance". The Plain Style is characterized by smaller headstone markers with unornamented, and bluntly factual inscriptions. It begins in the very early Colonial period, and lasts until roughly the first decade of the Eighteenth century. In most scholarly overviews, the amateurish carvings are attributed to a lack of tools and know-how on the part of the very early