Conservation of the Côa Valley rock art outcrops: a question of urgency and priorities

Abstract

The Coa Valley in north-eastern Portugal is one of the most significant prehistoric open-air rock art sites in the world, as its inscription in the World Heritage List demonstrates. The majority of engraved motifs (see Figures 1, 4, 5 & 6) has reliably been dated to the Upper Palaeolithic (Aubry & Sampaio 2008), although imagery from the Neolithic, Iron Age, historical and contemporary periods have also been identified (for an introduction to the Coa rock art see Baptista 1999 or Baptista & Fernandes 2007). Most of the outcrops which contain rock art motifs are located in an area of schist bedrock, scattered along both banks of the final 17km of the river Coa and positioned at the foot of sharply inclined hills (Figures 2, 3 & 4).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.