****** 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.) Zilhão, João. 1997. Ministério da Cultura, Lisbon. pp. 417-435 Zilhão, João. 1995b. The stylistically Paleolithic petroglyphs of the Côa  Valley (Portugal) are of Paleolithic age: A refutation of their ‘direct dating » to recent times. In Jorge, V.O. (Ed.) Dossier Côa . Socedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia, Porto. pp. 119-165 Zilhão, João (Ed.) 1997. Arte Rupestre e Pré-historia do Vale do Côa : Trabalhos de 1995-1996. Ministério da Cultura, Lisbon. (All the earliest articles concerning direct dating attempts at Côa, including ones by Bednarik, Watchman, and Zilhão, in English, are compiled in the annex of this book). Zilhão, João. On-line commentary, including scans from a letter from Alan Watchman and Robert Bednarik to the EDP that Zilhão claims shows that they “...actively collaborated with EDP to denigrate the importance of the Côa Valley rock art sites and to help in their drowning.” In TRACCE no. 4 at: tracce/zilrep2.html Footnotes have been added to the internet version of the article to provide historical perspective and more detail about sources than the versions that were published & distributed in 1995. 1 The three discoverers of the Chauvet Cave were Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet. While Chauvet’s name was given to the cave itself, the names of his co-discoverers were given to two of its large chambers. 2 The IPPAR announced the existence of the valley’s engravings on November 19, 1994 but a video was made of them in 1993. Bahn 1995, pp. 2. 3 Clottes 1995. 4 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 267 5 Electricidade de Portugal 6 Ribeira de Piscos / Quinta dos Poios, Muxagata 7 Bednarik 1994; Simons in the New York Times 1994. 8 Bednarik 1994 9 Jorge 1995. pp. 29-31 10 Bahn 1995 for a re-capitulation of the same accusations against the IPPAR & Rebanda. 11 IPPAR stands for the Instituto Português do Patrimonio Arquitectónico e Arqueológico 12 Harrington. Art News. March 1995 13 Dr. Mila Simões de Abreu and Ludwig Jaffe were the founders of the APAAR (Associaçao Portuguesa de Arte e Arqueologia Rupestre), which has been a member of IFRAO (International Federation of Rock Art Organisations) since Sept. 1992. Dr. Simões was its chairperson. Jaffe was also the IFRAO representative of the Società Cooperativa Archaeologica, Le Orme dell’Uomo, Italy (Bednarik 1994). The story of the denunciation is from Bednarik (1994) and Simons in the New York Times (1994). 14 Bahn 1995, p. 2 15 Quoted by Harrington. Art News. March 1995 16 Quoted by Harrington. Art News. March 1995 17 Canada do Inferno, Vila Nova de Foz Côa 18 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 263 19 Simons in the New York Times 1994. 20 Bahn 1995, pp. 2 21 Simons in the New York Times 1994. 22 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 264 23 Bahn 1995, pp. 2 (3 meters) with Simons in the New York Times 1994 concerning lowering the reservoir. 24 Simons in the New York Times 1994. 25 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 263 26 Bahn 1995, p. 2 27 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 264 28 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 264 29 “...his (Clottes’) conclusions pointed to the study of the engravings prior to their submersion since he stated that the engravings would be better conserved under water, because the Portuguese authorities would not be able to cope with the actions of vandalism. This view, revealed in a press conference in Foz Côa on 16 December 1994, aroused great indignation in the Portuguese media and, consequentIy, in national public opinion.” Baptista & Fernandes. 2007. p. 264 30 Simons in the New York Times 1994. 31 Quoted by Harrington. Art News. March 1995 32 Harrington. Art News. March 1995 33 Bednarik & Jaffe have been the most outspoken spokesmen about delusions concerning the protective qualities of reservoirs – which not only inundate art panels with water but deep alluvial deposits that make their later recovery dangerous and impractical. In an on-line commentary, Jaffe denounced what he perceived as a continuation of the scandal under new management: “In December 1994 IPPAR passed the responsibility for the rock art in the Coa valley to Mario Varela Gomes and Antonio Martinho Baptista. Gomes' first public statement in January 1995 was to advocate the submersion of the rock art.... When Abreu called for an international commission to consider the finds, Gomes voiced opposition to involving foreigners.... Both” - Baptista and Gomes – “were closely involved in the rationale to submerge the rock art (to 'protect it from vandals'); in fact, on 8 November Baptista spoke of how sedimentation behind dams should protect rock art” - my italics. “During Clottes' December 1994 visit Gomes helped convince him to favour the submersion of the sites (in view of the vandalism of the Mazouco horse, angry dam workers and locals, etc.). The truth is that the worst damage the Mazouco figures suffered occurred when Gomes himself enhanced them... ” (Jaffe). Later, Bednarik spear-headed another campaign to save a Portuguese rock-art assemblage from inundation – this time behind a dam in the Guadiana Valley - and noted that “None of this helps the rock art of the Guadiana, condemned to inundation under billions of tonnes of lake sediment as the reservoir silts up over the next 70 years” – again, my italics. (See Bednarik, home/guadiana/web/index.html) 34 Interestingly, a few years after this appeal was written, Clottes came under fierce attack and even ridicule by many representatives of the French intelligentsia, including some of the country’s most prominent prehistorians, after he and David Lewis-Williams published “The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and magic in the painted caves” in 1996. Their critics often subscribe to the doctrine that modern ethnographic evidence cannot be used to interpret ancient cultures. Although it is true that one must be extremely circumspect about doing so, such evidence often opens new perspectives that have more in common with the subsistence systems of ancient cultures than does our own, and the two authors showed considerable originality and courage in exploring it. 35 Clottes 1998 b. 36 Baptista & Fernandes 2007. p. 264 37 Bednarik 1994. Although Bednarik was one of the earliest crusaders for Côa - calling for the EDP to stop building the dam in Nov. 1994 - most Portuguese archaeologists with access to the Côa sites now shun him as thoroughly as they do Clottes and Rebanda. What happened is that the Portuguese government decided “...to arrange a series of blind tests to establish the antiquity of the rock-art” after consulting with Clottes in his capacity as UNESCO’s main adviser on rock art (Bednarik 1995). After our departure, Bednarik and three other researchers (Alan Watchman from Canada, plus Fred Phillips and Ronald Dorn from the USA), who believed that they had found ways to date rock art directly, studied some of the Côa’s engravings during separate visits. But not before signing controversial non-disclosure agreements with the EDP, which was hoping that their techniques would yield dates so recent that they could be used to ridicule stylistic daters who had identified the engravings as Paleolithic (Baptista & Fernandes 2007, p. 266). Unfortunately, Bednarik, who is one of the world’s most encyclopedically informed, accomplished, and bold prehistorians, walked right into the trap. Somewhat like Clottes. And like Clottes, perhaps he should have foreseen the dangers. First, because his dating system, which was based on determining the degree of micro-erosion undergone by a rock face, had been developed in Australia, where climate and geological conditions are different from Portugal’s. But even more importantly, because it had not been independe


But he shied at the last moment, and wouldn't quite say where. Still, we had our bearings, and drove off into the late afternoon to penetrate the heart of the forbidden zone.


The first few stabs were dead-ends: a quarry where slate pickets for vines were carved from chasms; a burning dump with the hairy leg of a cow sticking from a fire; a slab overhanging orchards where a feral dog, with a coat as motley and brindled as a hyena’s, galloped for cover. We were getting closer, very close now, and could spy loops of a trail among the folds of a distant ridge.


The next time the car eased over the knuckles of a road crisscrossed by up-ended strata, past empty huts built just of stacked slabs, and jostled between overhanging and plunging cliffs until an avalanche of tailings from an old quarry almost blocked the path. Our wheels inched along a disintegrating brink. But, suddenly, water glinted below. Draped before us, canyon facades promised a gallery befitting a once open planet.


Here was one of the places of grandeur where our ancestors had first grasped visions and then concretized them by hewing - and sometimes painting - images into rock panels. And here too was the arena where one of the greatest feuds between discoverers and custodians of the past had exploded since the conflict between Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope over the fossils of extinct giants in Sioux territory during Custer's battles. In this walled garden, the conflicting passions of archaeologists had exploded around a campfire, set a president and prime minister against each other, and cowed the emissaries of UNESCO. We would be the first to camp around embers that had sparked brush fires around the world.


But, first, to business! With swifts swirling in up-drafts around our heads, we scrambled and picked our way among sheer precipices and ledges. Lizards skidded into fissures, a rusty blade wedged in a nook beside a sliver of cliff garden spoke of an emigrant who had never returned, but the walls seemed barren. As shadows welled from the valley, we turned from the scarps and trundled downwards into the cleavage, till the road turned into a path to the water through a profusion of poppies.


Around us was the raw embrace of another abandoned quarry. Its tight horseshoe of cliffs and rubble made the perfect hiding place for our car and tent from the gray guards roaming the surrounding crests with binoculars. And before us lay the broadened river. No current showed amid the algal stagnation that had deadened deepened waters. The first flurry of press articles had mentioned that many of the engravings were already submerged by the cofferdam holding the river back for the more monstrous wall rising downstream from it. But, still, the river managed a pulse. Intermittent splashes smacked echoes off the walls, a frog croaked and some beast keened a cry we had never heard. We couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't the last of its kind.


We hid the car & tent inside this quarry & conducted surveys for engravings at dawn & dusk, when we were least likely to be spotted & slanting light made it easier to see faint incisions.


The next morning I tossed awake in the dewy chill as dawn brimmed over the peaks. Sebastian snuggled tighter into his sleeping bag, so I set out to reconnoiter alone, systematically working quadrants and contours between our quarry at Fariseu and Piscos brook. As I did so, tinkling sounded high on the opposite slope. Finally, I discerned a flock ambling down through dry brush, then a shirt flashed a white dot, and we converged within hailing distance on opposite banks. I sent greetings and the shepherd expostulated and gestured animatedly upstream towards towering slabs.


As I pushed forward and the river grew shallower, turtles became so numerous that their stacks toppled like circus acts from the brinks of submerged cliffs. Somewhere among the jumble of a thousand rock faces would be an ancient image - perhaps masked by lichen or so faint one had to trace its parts before seeing it whole. Over and over again, the scene seemed set, the rock stretched, but its lines were just fractals. Even ideal panels on either side of a fig tree bulging titanically from a small cave were barren. Surely they had sheltered here….


Then, up there, a line ran across the grain - and another curved into it! A TAIL! I yanked myself up to a platform less than a step wide and a ten-foot long cow - an auroch! - the wild primordial ancestor of longhorns and lunging bulls, strode beside me. Magic.


As a draftsman, I could feel empathy for the beast flowing into the hands that had etched her. The auroch's grace and concision was the pith of observation. By holding the animal's form and movement vividly in mind, the maker had poured himself into its body and experienced a power beyond abstraction, beyond even tool-making, to thrill to the new power of passing through the looking-glass into another being. Magic indeed. For me, all of mankind's later accomplishments, all our later experience of good and evil only become possible after such art. And so, forgive me, but in comparison to these ancient windows, cathedrals seem to have anti-climatic and overwrought power. I nearly took a step back in my excitement.


This first frieze stood at a fitting point, practically where the reservoir yielded to the original rapids and long pools of the virgin river. The numbed waters suddenly spangled upstream with glitter and so many flowery white tresses of water plants that the currents looked like sudsy pastures. A stream, running pure as its springs over crisp cresses between alternating bull rushes and crags, almost made it to the river unaltered, but met it just below the threshold and sank into an estuary. If there had been a living site, it had been there, at the mouth of Piscos brook, almost at the auroch's feet.6


When I peered in, huge mud-colored carp patrolled over the dueling flash of silver flanks. The creek was teeming! And all around now, life had broken out. A stand of poplar trees crackled like Chinese New Year with small birds, abundant as leaves. Peepers to bullfrogs kept up another side of the orchestra. Except for the absence now of bigger species, this was how Solutreans had experienced the world - with whistling, mooing, barking, roaring and trumpeting not just on the Serengeti, but to the frozen north!



I turned back, amidst turtles flipping off their stools all over again. It was time to take a stroll down the corridors of power.


The confluence of the Ribeira de Piscos (Piscos Brook) & the Côa River, looking upstream without the rapids that appear when the Pocinho Reservoir is lower.



  Another gigantic engraving of an auroch high on an outcropping at Quinta de Barca, opposite Penascosa in the Côa Valley.



- PROMETHEUS BOUND -


Far away across the moonscape of rutted ramps, knots of men stood before tunnels as fleets of dump trucks, made so tiny by distance that they only gave away their magnitude by over-sized wheels, eased to the brink of platforms, and added avalanches to tailings. Explosions roared and the dust of sundered mountains filled the enormous enterprise. We had arrived at Pandemonium and would try to insinuate ourselves into an audience with the Chief Engineer himself. It was a good thing we had his name, Lima Monteiro, because the Securitas guard on this side meant business. 


Above us, the titanium-white cleanliness of the cement plant's towers stood in bold contrast to the devastation, like a phalanx of gigantic chess-rooks bunched for the kill. Below them, a half dozen building complexes were set on shelves on the crater walls. Only one was so spotless and redolent of perks, though, with its rolled lawn incongruous in the desert, that we knew right where to head among forking roads. Our compact car slid in among Mercedes and I stepped into glare, drawing cool stares from fleshy faces. No problemo, I've stridden through institutions with a beard and badge for years now.


As I entered, a group of professionals appraised me and went on talking shop. When I took advantage of a lull to launch my request, I heard the ricocheting mention of "archaeologist" and "gravuras" wrapped with uneasy disdain. I was hardly surprised when these well-fed pros passed the buck to the only gaunt and partially toothless fellow traveler among them. My interlocutor explained that the Chief Engineer was powerless to help me, so he couldn't be bothered to give me an audience.


Still, my gentle persistence posed a problem. After all the noisy demonstrations against the dam in Lisbon, how were they to know how much clout a nosy prehistorian might have? So they decided to play it safe by dumping me on their pet nemesis, the organization’s own archaeological “hireling”, Dr. Nelson Rebanda.      


According to press articles, the dam-builders had recognized him as the true discoverer of Portugal's first reported Paleolithic engravings, at nearby Mazouco, even though the doctoral student's mentor, Professor Vitor Oliviera Jorge, had stolen his thunder.7 They had given Rebanda a job as their obligatory salvage archaeologist when the new doctor somehow couldn't get a position on a faculty. They had even agreed to keep out "trespassers" so Rebanda could announce his discoveries himself this time.8


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