Fariseu: first confirmed open-air Palaeolithic parietal art site in the Côa Valley (Portugal)

Abstract

For a long time prehistorians accepted as conventional wisdom the idea that Palaeolithic parietal art was confined to caves where it could be kept hidden from uninitiated individuals. So, it was not surprising that the age of hundreds of petroglyphs discovered on exposed cliffs bordering the Portuguese river Côa became a matter of controversy among some rock art specialists (Bahn 1995; Bednarik 1995; Zilhão 1995; Dorn 1997), since the animals represented and pictorial compositions showed great affinities with upper Palaeolithic cave art of Spain and France. Objections were raised to attributing so many well-preserved petroglyphs in an open-air site to the Palaeolithic. Miscellaneous attempts to get direct ages for the engravings themselves failed to establish the true antiquity of this site because the dating methods employed were ill-suited to the task. We wish to report below some thermoluminescence (TL) dates for burnt lithic remains from the archaeological levels of the Fariseu site which should close the debate, since some of the levels dated rise above the lower portions of numerous designs. In this letter we show that most if not all of the compositions are undoubtedly more than 14 500 years old. In 1991 over 17km of the cliff faces bordering the river Côa (a tributary of the Douro, in north-eastern Portugal, Figure 1) were found to be covered with carvings of horses, aurochs, deer, and other wild

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