its chin to lever itself over steps. We patted it: still so roly-poly, although it would soon be prowling the perimeter. Even the guard wanted to keep his innocence, taking the refreshing break to be our guide. As we wound our way down towards the reservoir among towering red cliffs, he took quiet pride in pointing out the hidden elements of scattered engravings. When we reached the water, though, he hesitated... hesitated before announcing that 24 of the finest works were already submerged at our feet. For this was Hell’s Canyon – the site that Clottes had been rushed through. A Securitas guard and his dog protecting engravings in the Côa Valley 15 years after this article was written. Our guide was a decent young man who couldn't help feeling uneasy blocking access to these bold masterpieces at the source of all our arts. It was probably his first job after military service, but he was intelligent enough to realize that he’d been hired as a pawn in a vast conspiracy to keep Portugal's greatest cultural wonders out of sight and out of mind, till they could be obliterated. For a recent young patriot, it couldn't help but sit the wrong way. "They only lowered the water once," he confided, "and that was when President Soares himself came after he announced that he was for protecting the engravings. As soon as he was gone, they brought the level right back up." "Didn't they even lower it for Clottes?" I asked, wanting to hear his answer. One of the many panels with proto-Solutrean, pecked outlines of animals at Canada do Inferno, Foz Côa. It was in his eyes. "No," he said firmly and I realized that such powerlessness on high in the face of Portugal's true powers was oddly consoling for a young man in his position. "Well," I persevered, "someone must have come to study how to remove the engravings at least? I mean, this is a slate mining region: there must be plenty of people right in Foz Côa who could remove the slabs for a museum." "Them, they'd have no idea!" he looked as if I'd suggested that village idiots could have painted the Sistine Chapel. "The constructors did a study: it can't be done. The engravings would break!" "Come on," I burst out before I could think better of it, "haven't they ever heard of glue?" It was bad enough that these dammers were drowning the finest combination of scenery and open-air Paleolithic art in Europe, I thought, so they don't have to compound their crime by spreading misinformation - this, this balderdash even about the chance of salvaging it! Here they could move mountains and they dared tell people no one could save the art! Why, moving these small panels would be child's play by comparison to saving Abu Simbel in the early Sixties.50 In fact, if the dam-builders insisted on flooding the valley and making any salvage effort revenue-generated, they could even crassly put 1/10th of the panels up for auction at Sotheby's - and make a profit! But, oh, no! Everything would have to be lost to the world forever. Their stingy hypocrisy and philistinism revolted me: they wouldn't spend a penny on protecting such discoveries, but they'd drown the world up to its headwaters to keep driving Mercedes. It dawned on me why they wanted us to swallow such lies. One, because any plan to remove the friezes not only meant assigning a value to them, but keeping the controversy alive. And if the slabs were ever housed in some "museum" like teeth yanked from nature's face, they'd be a perpetual affront to the dammers' achievement. As a screenwriter, I began to wonder just how far they'd go.... But as a devoted conservator, I wondered how far I should go.... For I knew that if it weren't so noisy and there weren't the risk of being thrown in prison by these "protectors", I myself could have extracted the smaller sculptures without losing a crumb - and with nothing more than dedication and a rock hammer. By God, I thought, if the flooders don't save them, I hope the townspeople storm the valley! - The Pilgrims - And sure enough, at the next site, they seemed to be doing just that. The mountainous dirt road forked, meandered and even skirted an imposing castle,51 but several classes of children were making the long dusty pilgrimage on foot while carloads of adults in their Sunday best made the excursion to see the only engravings to have escaped the censors - either because the site at Penascosa was so far from Lima Montiero's spyglass or because the valley was gentler here and had always been farmed. If the guards hadn't been under strict orders not to sell admissions, they'd have made a killing; but then any financial association with the art is anathema to the dammers: the next thing they knew, they'd have a revolt on their hands! A stag with huge antlers formed by scraping. Penascosa, Castelo Melhor. Still, these guards were actually tame as the locals poured down to catch a glimpse of the animals through the fence. This time our escort gave us the same detailed explanations, but was more practiced. And like the first guard, when he realized that I had somehow gotten authorization despite my evident opposition to the reservoir, he let out his pent-up indignation - for we were insiders. "Come with me," he summoned us, leaving his time-clock with his colleague and leading us out of the enclosure; "You see the summit of that big hill, that's how high the water will be; And over there - come, come - this is a Roman road," - and what a road! - still usable and entirely composed of megalithic slabs - "and here, look at this inscription, it's Phoenician; and here, see these carved chambers in the riverbed, they are the remains of a medieval mill. But upstream," we were already more than 6 kilometers from the dam site, "10 kilometers from here, at Faia, there are paintings of animals – not engravings - in granite, not slate, and the walls are so steep that only climbers have seen them. When the water rises, everything to Faia will be gone." The young man might as well have grabbed my arm and pleaded: "Please, PLEASE, sound the alarm!" After he'd hastened to take up his time-clock again, I wandered if there might not be even more testimonials of man's attraction to this classical Eden with its islets and fords in the flowery river, and browsed through a plowed orchard, along a contour which I judged would have been the valley floor half a million years ago. I hadn't passed the first olive tree when I happened upon a well-knapped hand-axe, and then another! So this, our entire past, was the price of such "clean" power! I may be quixotic, but I’ll choose windmills over this destruction any day! ****** We knew the next dawn would be our last, so we broke camp in blue light to explore the teeming side-valley beyond the first auroch. According to Rebanda’s wall maps, something lay just around the first bend. As we passed the threshold between the deadened depths and virgin current with its billowing water-foliage, we had to skirt and climb over a sheer wall blocking the side-valley’s entrance. But then Piscos Brook ran between trees, pastures and cane-groves, with cliffs full of shelters and stone panels at each bend. There were so many warblers piping and whistling, there must have been a dozen species with overlapping territories. Goldfinches sparked into the air, a crested hoopoo flashed orange and black, and the shaggy canes were a tumult of avian chatter. At our feet, frogs skipped like pebbles and painted turtles rowed earnestly in tangled water blossoms - all for the taking. But we had no intention of disturbing any more beasts and scouted the first rocks. Nothing, nothing…. Then, telltale lines.... Bellies, rumps, backs, heads: horses nuzzling! The intertwined couple, spanning the length of a single real horse, was still necking in Eden after twenty millennia. With the flood rising up the slope their affection seemed so poignant. How dare the dammers condemn this couple? I despaired, unless enough of us care. Unless you and I and all of us together add our voices to those of the Portuguese citizenry trekking down for a last look, and reclaim what is OURS! Not Portugal's - OURS - because this art is so old, despite its elegance, that we share the blood and genius of those distant ancestors who awoke to the universe, whether our cavalcade of ancestors migrated around the Old World or came across the Bering Straits 14,000 years ago. This art is ours, just as it is Rebanda's and Jorge's, so I implore you; please, take a moment now to lay your claim to your heritage and your genius and write your heart out to: His Excellency, President Mario Soares c/o Professor Vitor Oliveira Jorge Instituto de Arqueologia facultad de Letras rua Campo Alegre 1055 4100 Porto, Portugal and, if you would like to reinforce your point, to our other protagonist: Dr. Nelson Rebanda Largo de Corredoura 5160 Moncorvo, Portugal Tell them: "I want to add my voice to yours and save one of the ancestral homes and glories of our species - MY HOME AND YOURS at Foz Côa!" ****** Côa & Paris, May 1995 For further information on how you can help, please contact: PREHISTORIC ART EMERGENCY c/o Duncan Caldwell, Director 18 rue Rambuteau [B35] 75003 Paris FRANCE Oct. – June: Tel. +33-14804-0356 July - Sept.: Tel. 1-508-645-2009 © 1995 Duncan Caldwell on the above text; © 2010 Duncan Caldwell on photo & footnotes A pecked stag looking over its shoulder. Vale de Cabroes, Foz Côa COMBINED PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR: - the original 1995 article, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Conspiracy to Flood the Seventh Wonder of Prehistory” - and “Drama on the Coa: A Bold New Museum & Retrospective on the Fiercest Archaeological Feud of Modern Times” Anonymous. 1995. Old art or ancient art? New York Times. 16 July. Aubry, Thierry; Baptista, António Martinho. 2000. Une datation objective de l’art du Côa. La Recherche, hors-série, 4 :54-55. Aubry, Thierry; Sampaio, Jorge David. 2008. Chronologie et contexte archéologique des gravures paléolithiques de plein air de la Vallée du Côa (Portugal). In Balbín Behrmann, R. (Ed.) - Arte al aire libre en el Sur de Europa. Junta de Castilla y Léon, p. 211-223. Bahn, Paul G. 1995. Paleolithic Engravings Endangered in Côa Valley, Portugal. La Pintura, The Official Newsletter of the American Rock Art Research Association (Member of IFRAO) Volume 21, Number 3, Winter. Baptista, António Martinho; Fernandes, António Pedra Batarda. 2007. Rock Art and the Côa Valley Archaeological Park: A case study in the preservation of Portugal's prehistoric parietal heritage. Chapter 14 in « Palaeolithic Cave Art at Creswell Crags in European Context », (Eds.) Pettitt, P.; Bahn, P. ; Ripoll, S. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp. 263-279 Bednarik, R.G. 1994. The Hell’s Canyon Petroglyphs in Portugal. Rock Art Research. 11(2) Nov.:151-152 Bednarik, R.G. 1995. The Côa Petroglyphs: An obituary to the stylistic dating of Palaeolithic rock-art. Antiquity 69: 877-883. Compliled later in “Arte Rupestre e Pré-historia do Vale do Côa : Trabalhos de 1995-1996” (Ed.) Zilhão, João. 1997. Ministério da Cultura, Lisbon. pp. 411-416 Bednarik, R.G. On-line commentary entitled “Some corrections about the Côa petroglyphs” in TRACCE no. 3 at : tracce/coacor.html#bed Clottes, Jean. 1995. Paleolithic Petroglyphs of Foz Côa, Portugal. International Newsletter on Rock Art. 10:2. Clottes, Jean. 1998 a. ‘The Three Cs’: Fresh avenues towards European Palaeolithic art. Chapter 7 in « The Archaeology of Rock-art » Eds. Chippindale, Christopher; Tacon, Paul Stephen Charles. pp. 112-129. 373 pages Clottes, Jean. 1998 b. Voyage en préhistoire : L’Art des cavernes et des arbris, de la decouverte à l’interprétation. La Maison des Roches, Paris. Dorn, Ronald I. 1996. A change in perception. La Pintura, 23 (2), pp. 10-11. Dorn, Ronald I. 1997. Constraining the age of the Côa valley (Portugal) engravings with radiocarbon dating. Antiquity, 71, pp. 105-115. Harrington, Spencer P.M. 1995. Archeologists damn dam... Art News. March. Jaffe, Ludwig; Bednarik, Robert. On-line commentary. Date of posting unknown, at: home/guadiana/web/coa.html Jorge, Vitor Oliviera. (Ed.) Dossier Côa . Socedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia, Porto. 35/4 Landi, Ann. 1995 ... And rave about cave. Art News. March. Rebanda, Nelson. 1995. Os trabalhos arqueológicos e o complexo de arte rupestre do Côa. Sepa do Jornal IPPAR (Lisbon) Reuters. 1995. Rock carvings halt work on a Portuguese dam. International Herald Tribune. 8 November. Simons, Marlise. 1994. Vast stone age art gallery is found but dam may flood it. New York Times. 27 December. Vincent, Catherine. 1995. La communauté internationale se mobilise pour sauver le site paléolithique de Foz Côa. Le Monde. 11 March. Whitley, David S.; Simon, Joseph M. 2002. Recent AMS radiocarbon rock engraving dates. INORA, No. 32. pp. 10-15. Zilhão, João. 1995a. The age of the Côa Valley (Portugal) Rock-art : Validation of archaeological dating to the Palaeolithic and refutation of ‘scientific’ dating to historic or proto-historic times. Antiquity, 69 : 883-901. Compiled later in “Arte Rupestre e Pré-historia do Vale do Côa : Trabalhos de 1995-1996” (Ed.) Zilhã I don't see any difference between Chauvet and myself!"


"Unfortunately, that's the nature of open-air sites," I sympathized, while taking gentle exception. "They're accessible."


So it's true, I thought, drowning the site was Rebanda's solution to the problem of ownership of photographic rights. When, in fact, the long-term rights for the cave in France would belong to its Ministry of Culture – which was already attacking its discoverer, Chauvet, for the pittance he’d received for his pictures. Rebanda was even fooling himself on this score, I thought - after all, the Foz Côa photographs would probably end up belonging to Portugal’s own ministry or even the EDP. If the doctor had wanted to make a killing, he’d misplayed his cards. If only he'd announced the discovery, co-opted his employers, and splashed masterpieces across magazine covers while the art's existence was still fresh, he might have won honor, fame, a very small fortune (and maybe even kept his job).


"But you are publishing the definitive work, and in the end everyone will refer to that," I ventured.


"Well, - yes." Rebanda seemed uncertain, as if he had abandoned the idea.


"Then I would be honored if I could order a copy now - and pay for it in advance -"


"Oh, it's too early for that."


"Then I'd be grateful if you'd take my address and put me on the waiting list."


"The waiting list? Yes, well, I'll send you one." He led me off to take my name. "Can you stay till Monday?" he suddenly warmed up, "because there will be a tour - without me - in conjunction with the international conference on Foz Côa which Professor Jorge is holding in Porto this weekend."


The same ubiquitous professor? "But why aren't you speaking and leading the tour?" I asked ingenuously, while apologizing for our bad timing.


"It's the third conference on Foz Côa and I haven't been invited to any of them," he grimaced. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the pariah. Scientists - like lawyers - ply an adversarial trade, but the chance to put Portugal into the archaeological heavens – and to boost their own reputations with it - had given many researchers more ulterior motives than usual. Their meetings were becoming righteous feeding frenzies. Within weeks, local academics had begun signing their names to Rebanda’s discoveries, tracings, and interpretations while forgetting to cite him. Although they granted him the discovery of Hell’s Canyon (in footnotes), other sites that Rebanda had already noted were soon claimed by competitors as Rebanda was effectively silenced.


"But you're Portugal's expert on the Upper Paleolithic!” I cried indignantly. “You discovered Mazouco and...."


"No, I discovered these engravings at Foz Côa, but there were country people who knew about the ones at Mazouco and associated them with witchcraft; I just learned of them while I was researching my doctorate. Naturally, I told my mentor, Jorge, but he wouldn't wait for me to publish my thesis, and had to publish the discovery himself."


"But didn't he give you credit?"


"Of course, in a footnote, in which he didn't even differentiate me from the superstitious peasants. This upper-class professor and that upper-class professor gave papers based on my research, but after I earned my degree I couldn't get a job on a faculty. All the positions were reserved for candidates from "good" families - not a country boy like myself. So, I had to take a job as a salvage archaeologist, and can't even give papers at the universities, since the professors think of us as technicians."


Those to whom evil is done may do it in return, I thought. But I could hardly hold my tongue: why on earth had he invited people from this caste of academics back into his life - and the valley - when at least one of them had apparently abused him? "And now they are spreading these calumnies against me," he continued. "Saying I wanted to destroy my own discoveries - when I invited three colleagues, including Mila Simões and Jaffe, to come help me save them. Then one of them called Vitor. And Vitor and his wife, Susana” - was it my imagination or did her name stick in his craw? – “came too. And I pleaded with them all to help me save the engravings. They're telling lies, LIES about what I said. Do you think I'm such a fool as to invite the man who deprived me of the credit for my first discovery, to come see my greatest wonders if it wasn't because I needed all the allies I could get; if it wasn't because I even needed the universities to help save them. It's CRAZY!"


I was dumb-founded: could this be another case of scientists using the press with its short attention span and superficiality to smear a colleague and co-opt his discoveries?40 According to Simões, she and Jaffe had received a panicked call from Rebanda "in the middle of the night... shouting that I should come quickly, that there was rock art that would soon be inundated." A brief drop in the reservoir behind the Pocinho dam caused by Spanish dams upstream and work at Pocinho had provided a few days to see art that was usually submerged, before it disappeared forever, as the water began rising inexorably within the next few days behind both the old and new dams - until even the few engravings that remained above the Pocinho reservoir were gone by August 1995.41 When they drove to the valley the next day - Nov. 8, 1994 - because Rebanda "sounded so worried" - what they "saw was amazing, magnificent." But Rebanda wanted them to become accomplices! "He said he would publish a thesis and a book, but by then the images would be covered by water so he needed (us) to authenticate them." Simões claimed that she demanded that the discovery be announced "because the Portuguese people must decide if they want a dam there or not." But "Rebanda made a scene. He started shouting. He even threw his hat on the ground and jumped on it. He said he wanted nobody to know, that he wanted to keep all this for his book."42 He became so agitated that he even “...made a series of threats.”43


Wow! Maybe her words had been distorted by a translation, but that double reference to "shouting", the call to patriotism, the insistence about Rebanda’s manic jumping on his own hat, and Rebanda’s failure to pre-empt them once he knew their intentions all made me as uneasy as an interrogator picking up a suspect’s tells. Something about the scenario seemed too pat.


But what if Simões and Jaffe had mollified Rebanda by saying something like: "Yes, yes, we must act in concert; give us a few days to get back to you with a plan," and then hiked out with Rebanda as partners - only to pull the rug from under the upstart by presenting the portrait she had painted for the international press of the EDP hireling stomping around the campfire screaming betrayal? The picture was compelling: Simões and her husband angelically insisting that the world must be told, while the hireling screamed demonically over the fire, accusing university archaeologists of trying to hog the credit yet again.


But was it plausible? If Rebanda had known Simões and Jaffe were going to paint him into a corner, wouldn't he have raced for the exit? Personally, I couldn't see anybody bedding down for the night and traipsing out the next morning with people who had announced that they were going to expose him. In Rebanda's place, I'd have calmed down and let the traitors fall to sleep, but then I'd have snuck away - trekking fast through the dark, picking myself up when I fell, but getting out - bloody knees and all - and calling that alarm first! I'd have been the one to announce the existence of the largest gathering of open-air Paleolithic engravings in Europe to the world. And saved myself by taking the glory.


But then, what about Rebanda's self-serving talk of photo credits, not to mention the engravings already submerged by the dam at the doorstep – and his belief that the engravings were doomed to be flooded?


Strangely enough, I could again see it being both ways, since the roots of tragedy are self-deception and entwined motives. Both Rebanda and Simões de Abreu could have been traitors and saviors at once, and as long as I was with this archaeologist, I felt bound to encourage the savior in him. In essence, my heart – if not my mind - had taken his side for the moment; he was the underdog, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I was concerned that he might even attempt suicide. Furthermore, I had no doubt - whatever pacts he'd struck - that he would make up for them if only approached constructively. After all, he’d certainly proved himself to be the best Paleolithic art prospector in the country – if not the Iberian Peninsula!44


But perhaps he wasn't the only gullible one.


He must have realized that I was rooting for him to pull himself out of his tailspin, because suddenly he decided. "I'm going to call the president of the Institute. Maybe I can get you the approval."


Rebanda was back on the phone in a minute, this time wheedling and wrangling. I could see he was really having to push. Finally, he hung up; they needed a petition giving my credentials and motives. After we'd faxed it, I was sorry to see him having to still recall and refax, as he nudged the request repeatedly through the unyielding bureaucracy.


But, finally, the word came: they were going to let us into just one of the guarded sites. It must have seemed like an insult to him after all his efforts, so with an anarchic gesture, he announced, what the hell, he'd photocopy their fax when it came, so we could enter a second. If I didn't mind coming back at 9 the next morning, he apologized, the approval should be there. Poor man, I thought, he really is bound to their rack. As we parted, I invited him - for what it was worth - to come rest up with us in Paris, sorry that I would almost certainly have to "betray" a man who had ended up doing the right thing.   



- To Dam or Preserve - In Dollars and Sense -


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