Postcards from the Paleolithic
In Portugal, 21,000 years of Rock Art Masterpieces
What might it be like to get a postcard from the deep past? How about 5,000 postcards from as far back as 22,000 years ago? This is what archeologists discovered in Portugal’s remote Coa Valley in the Alto Douro, near the border with Spain, in the early 1990s. Teresa (my beloved wife) and I had been travelling through the region of Trás-os-Montes, just to the north of Coa, and so we decided to drop by the Coa Valley Archeological Park, and check out their new museum.
An early UNESCO report on the park described it as “the biggest open-air site of paleolithic art in Europe, if not in the world.” Usually, we think of paleolithic art as cave paintings. The Coa drawings are out in the open, spread over 23 sites along the Coa and Douro River valleys. Also, the drawings are not painted, they are line drawings carved directly into the stone — which is why they survived the elements. That plus the fact that this is a remote and uninhabited borderland, so wild, in fact, that an Iberian wolf restoration program is going on in the Coa Valley region as well.
The art may be prehistoric but it is not primitive. These artists had talent. They brought to life the animals crucial to our early ancestors’ survival — deer, horses, wild goats, aurochs (large prehistoric cattle), and also human figures. These provide an amazing glimpse of how prehistoric people saw their world and themselves. As UNESCO says of these “World Heritage Site” drawings:
Dating from the Upper Palaeolithic to the final Magdalenian/ Epipalaeolithic (22.000–8.000 BCE), [the drawings] represent a unique example of the first manifestations of human symbolic creation and of the beginnings of cultural development….The rock art…throws an exceptionally illuminating light on the social, economic, and spiritual life of our early ancestors.
Teresa and I first heard about the Coa Valley Archeological Park during a previous trip to Portugal in 2003. This was my first visit to her native land. At the time I was writing a book on the religions of pre-Christian Europe, so visiting Coa was at the top of my list. I don’t remember much at all from that trip. But I sure remember Coa, for all the wrong reasons.
The park then was less than a decade old. At that time there was no museum. One booked a guided tour in a jeep to visit the rock art on-site. Our jeep careened through crazy-steep dirt roads with hairpin turns and no shoulder at all. Just an extra inch or two of dirt and a sheer drop. The road was rocky, muddy, and rutted, and I remember being thrown from side to side in my seat. We feared for our lives sometimes as the jeep slipped on a curve or slithered through the mud.
It seemed to take hours just to get to the first art-rock site, which was…unsatisfying. What we didn’t realize was that the same flat stone surfaces had been used time and again by different artists through the centuries. They etched new figures right on top of the old ones. Individually, the drawings may have been masterpieces, but all we saw were jumbles of squiggles. Our guide would trace out the lines of some of the specific animals. But even with his help, it was hard to make out anything clearly. This went on site after site, until finally, exhausted, frustrated and defeated, we just wanted to go back to our hotel. Our photos of the day were terrible.
So in 2022, on this one thing Teresa and I were quite clear: we wanted to experience the new museum, but not the ride to and slog through the enormous park. We did learn in advance that the museum, which opened in 2010, does not contain any of the original art. That’s all still in the valley (and can still only be accessed via a guided jeep tour). However, the museum website promised state-of-the-art technical innovations in bringing the prehistoric drawings to life. Bingo.
The outside of the museum is a long concrete wedge in the hillside overlooking the wild river valley. The underground entrance looks as if it leads to a bunker or a bomb shelter. Inside, everything is dim, but the displays light up with neon colors that shimmer and glow green, red, purple and blue as the story of the paleolithic drawings unfolds. The absolute best thing about the museum is that it isolates the individual drawings that overlap on the rocks so that you can see each of their outlines clearly. Sometimes the outlines are projected right onto replicas of the original rocks so that the art seems to pop right out. In one case, they even animate some of the figures: you see the etched outline of a wild goat and then it springs to life, jumping and prancing across the rock as if frolicking on a cliffside.
The museum also highlighted some of the artistry involved. In several cases, there were animals that appeared to have two heads — but were in fact one animal with its head turned first in one direction and then in another, as if to portray the animal in motion— an artistic technique once thought to have been invented by that Cubist late-comer, Picasso!
Animals definitely dominated these artistic landscapes, which makes experts and flanêurs alike wonder, why? Did animals have a significant spiritual meaning? Was it simply pragmatic information about prey species that was being recorded (There are virtually no predators on the walls, except a few birds of prey.) Or was this art for art’s sake? The museum lays out several theories but wisely takes no sides.
The rare human figures from the Paleolithic period are mysterious and strange. The face on one figure looks absolutely as if Picasso drew it (below right). Two other figures are so explicitly phallic one has to wonder if this is evidence that men have been exaggerating their manhood since prehistoric times. Or, perhaps, more poetically, one could assume the artists were making symbolic connections between big penises and fecundity? Personally, I’m sticking with the exaggeration hypothesis.
As the museum notes explain, even after the Paleolithic Era, people kept drawing art on the rocks in these valleys. There’s a wealth of etchings dating from the Iron Age by the Celtic tribes known as the Lusitanians — an ancient people considered by modern Portuguese to be their direct ancestors. In our travels through Portugal, Teresa and I have stomped through a good number of Lusitanian ruins and museums filled with their potshards and implements, but never before had we seen drawings made by these warlike people of themselves. Sometimes they are on horseback, or depicted bearing a spear and round shield, which is exactly how the Roman writer Strabo described the Lusitanians.
There are even drawings from Mediaeval times. These latecomers also discovered the Coa Valley, and added their own works of art. It made me a little sad that this incredible lithic canvas had been lost to humanity for over a thousand years, and that in modern times, we would not be adding to this rock tapestry for our descendants yet to come. A few thousand years into the future, as humanity wanes and perhaps may wax again, wouldn’t it be great to have our story told, alongside these others, on the rocks of Coa Valley? At least the inhabitants of a distant-future Portugal might someday find this well-curated bunker-museum. To its credit, the museum did include a final room of modern art inspired by the prehistoric Coa drawings.
When Teresa and I finally emerged back, blinking, into the light, we felt transformed by the whole experience, and in awe of the amazing human beings who not only made this harsh landscape their home so many thousands of years ago, but sent postcards to us in the future.
There is final element to this story I only discovered while writing about it. Neither Teresa nor I realized that when the Coa Valley drawings were first discovered in the early 1990s, they were at the center of a massive controversy — a conflict of values and priorities that drew international attention to the nation, and may have contributed to bringing down Portugal’s government at the time.
Those archeologists who discovered the drawings were actually working at the behest of the national energy company, EDF! The plan was to build a dam in the Coa River, and the archeological survey was just a required box to tick. The discovery of ancient rock carvings came as a most unwelcome shock. For awhile, EDF even attempted to disprove the ancient age of the drawings and press ahead with the dam.
The archeologists called UNESCO, which quickly produced an initial report attesting to the antiquity value of the art. Other archeologists began additional investigations in the Coa Valley region and discovered even more rock drawings. A Portuguese citizens group in defense of the Coa arose with a slogan, “As gravuras não sabem nadar” (The carvings don’t know how to swim). The government vowed to proceed with the dam. Both national and international media heaped scorn upon them (The Sunday Times, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the BBC). A national groundswell against the dam arose and in the 1995 elections the government was defeated and the dam project was cancelled.
But for that dramatic result, the prehistoric postcards of the Coa Valley would have remained undelivered, its amazing, multilayered world of animals and humans buried forever in sediment and silt.
