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Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 04 September 2007 Page Views: 2319
Rock ArtCountry: Portugal Type: Rock ArtInternal Links:
Foz Côa, Portugal–The whole area is securely fenced off from the outside world and officials use four-wheel drive jeeps to transport visitors to and from the site.
The track is rutted and the jeep bounces and lurches crazily through innumerable potholes. "We keep it this way to discourage people from driving here themselves," says my guide Pedro Nuno. "We let the roads deteriorate because at first, we had some problems with vandalism."
Not any more, it seems. But as a precaution, guards scrutinize your every move as you move around the site.
What has been discovered here – or to be more precise, rediscovered – is precious indeed. Foz Côa contains some of the most stunning prehistoric artwork ever found, employing techniques that have revolutionized the way experts think about paleolithic art.
The Côa river valley –in a remote region known as Trás-os-Montes or "beyond the mountains" and close to the border with Spain – is special in other ways. The collection of rock art here spans eons – the oldest work dates back 25,000 years, the most recent is 20th century. And it is also the largest collection of outdoor paleolithic drawings anywhere in the world.
Prehistoric people drew what they saw – mountain goats, horses, aurochs (wild cattle), deer and the occasional fish. The canvasses were vertical rock faces and he used a variety of techniques – fine-line incision with a sharp tool, pecking (creating a deep line of indentation by hammering a pointed implement into the stone) and abrasion. Remnants of red paint have been found on some of 1,000 or more engravings that have been discovered to date.
"This is open-air art, unlike the cave art at Lascaux (in southern France) which is shamanistic and centred around magic," Nuno explains. "Here, much of it seems to have been done for pleasure."
Outlines of animals overlap and are layered on top of one another. But one thing that really got archaeologists excited were that some of the animals' heads and shoulders are shown in different positions – the artists' way of indicating movement and something that is unique to the Foz Côa engravings.
"Some are also 3D, using the shape of the rock to create the body of an animal," Nuno says. "Others are more than two metres long and were painted, so that you can see them from the other side of the river."
The hot sun beats down as Nuno and I make our way to the first set of drawings at Canada do Inferno; this part of the country has an unusual, Mediterranean microclimate that roasts you in the summer but gets distinctly chilly in winter.
Nuno uses a stem of grass to show me the first of the outlines. As your eyes get accustomed to the drawings, figures of long-extinct animals seem to emerge from the rock face.
"There are no drawings of mammoths," Nuno points out. "It was a little bit warm for them here."
It's something of a miracle that the Côa Valley Archaeological Park exists at all.
It all began when Electricidade de Portugal decided to build a hydro dam near the mouth of the River Côa, close to where it joins the River Douro.
In 1992, a government survey team conducting an environmental impact study found some of the carvings at a site that would have been flooded by the dam.
It was no surprise to the locals. "All the people here had known about the carvings for years," says Nuno. "They saw them when they used to wash their clothes in the river."
When the existence of the drawings was made public in 1994, archaeologists and others immediately campaigned to save the site. They even came up with a nifty slogan: "Petroglyphs don't float."
But many of the locals would have preferred the hydro dam and the prosperity that it would have brought to the area. And the then-governing Social Democrats also sided with the electricity company but were hotly opposed by the Socialist Party, which made halting work on the dam an election promise.
When the Socialist Party won the election in the fall of 1995, work on the dam was stopped and Portugal's first archaeological park established along the 17-kilometre valley. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1998. Two other sites – Ribeira de Piscos and Penascosa – are also open to the public but the number of visitors is kept to about 20,000 a year.
Nuno likes it that way.
"I don't know about mass tourism," he says, shaking his head doubtfully.
Nevertheless, construction has started on a visitors' centre and museum perched on top of a nearby hill. It is slated to open in 2008 .
Among the Celts
Another archaeological site well worth a visit is Citânia de Briteiros, 15 kilometres north of Guimaraes in the Minho region of Portugal.
This Celtic settlement dates back more than 2,000 years but probably came under Roman rule somewhere around 20 BC and survived until about 300 AD. The encampment is surrounded by a series of stout, stone walls, inside which are a series of plots containing two or three round houses, with sheds for the cattle and a cooking area outside. The foundations of more than 150 such stone huts have been unearthed.
Portugal is dotted with such "castros" – set high on hills, so that potential enemies could be seen from afar – and many cities in the Iberian peninsula are founded on such sites. The view is breathtaking.
Citânia de Briteiros was excavated in the late 19th century by Francisco Martins Sarmento, a wealthy, self-taught scholar.
"He recognized the archaeological possibilities of the site and bought the whole mountain and another one as well," says guide Vitor Marques. "He was very rich and put his money into the archaeology of the region."
Sarmento's manor, at the foot of Mount Sao Romao, now houses a collection of memorabilia and items from the mountain, including the whole granite doorway of what's thought to be a pre-Roman spa. The Museum Martins Sarmento in Guimaraes contains yet more axeheads, buckles, hairpins, coins and other discoveries from the site.
On top of the mountain, Sarmento reconstructed two of the round houses, complete with three-metre walls and large doorways.
"It was found later that he got the proportions wrong," Marques comments wryly.
The site itself is a maze of uneven pathways, with lizards lazing in the sunshine on broken-down walls. There's little signage and we are the only ones exploring the site. The whole place seems in a time warp, much as Sarmento left it.
"It is not easy to bring visitors here," admits Marques.
Like many historic sites throughout northern Portugal, both Foz Côa and Citânia de Briteiros are neglected, underappreciated and sadly underfunded.
"We have such potential," Foz Côa's Nuno says with a sigh, "but nobody invests anything here."
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