Portugal

The first Portuguese contacts with the Stone Age came through the navigators who reached the coasts of Africa, South America, and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By a.d. 1500 these contacts had already resulted in the production of the first reports on such peoples as the Guanche of the Canary Islands, the San (Bushmen) of Southern Africa, and the Indians of brazil, including accurate descriptions of polished stone axes and other tools. However, these descriptions failed to produce any impact on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists and scholars who studied Roman and pre-Roman antiquities.

By the end of the eighteenth century archaeology had become an established discipline. The first scientific excavations in Portugal were undertaken at the time by Friar Manuel do Cenáculo, in the Iron Age settlement of Cola (Alentejo). Several descriptions and inventories were published of dolmens, which were correctly interpreted as pre-Roman monuments but generally thought to be altars, not burial chambers. And, as elsewhere in Europe, it was not until the mid-1800s that the concept of the remote antiquity of humanity was finally accepted, mainly as a result of developments in the geological sciences.

Beginning in 1848 several organizations were created to survey the geology of the country, and prominent members of their staffs, such as Carlos Ribeiro and Joaquim Filipe Nery Delgado, became interested in the problem of human origins. Ribeiro’s work on the eolith problem and the possible existence of people in Europe in the Tertiary era is well known. It led scholars of the time to agree to convene the 1880 session of the Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistoriques in Lisbon in order to be able to inspect his sites and finds.

Delgado’s work is not as well known but is of greater general methodological relevance. He was appointed to the Geological Survey in August 1857 at the age of twenty-two, but his first independent work was the geological mapping of the Peniche area. This project eventually led him to the excavation of the Casa da Moura cave site, which he began on January 19, 1865. The results obtained after initial testing led to the almost immediate publication of an extensive bilingual (Portuguese and French) monograph whose title, The Existence of Man on Our Soil in Very Remote Times Proved by the Study of Caves, leaves no doubt as to the research design that drove him in this early stage of his scientific career.

At that time the evidence from caves was regarded as untrustworthy. It was the fluvial deposits of the Somme Valley that played a key role in the establishment of the remote antiquity of humans. They, in turn, were used to validate some of the associations between artifacts and extinct fauna found in various caves of Germany, England, france, and belgium. Several objections had been raised against such evidence. Some argued that deposits of very different ages could easily be intermixed during the flooding to which caves are often submitted; others contended that the use of caves by people to bury their dead may have caused the occurrence of human bone in apparent association with extinct faunas; and still others suggested that although the deposits might have been originally undisturbed, mixing could arise from careless investigation.

Since his work was wholly based on the exploration of caves, Delgado had to deal with these objections, which probably explains the most remarkable characteristic of his monograph: the fact that it represents an integrated geo-archaeological approach to site-formation processes. Moreover, the great detail with which he recorded stratigraphic observations (the correctness and precision of which have since been demonstrated by reexcavation of the residual deposits at Casa da Moura) was intended to avoid any objections that his conclusions were based on careless excavation.

His most important find was a carefully described and measured human skull and mandible, which were enveloped in a matrix of concreted red sands just like the ones that composed the in situ lower deposit of the site. This cranial material was clearly of Pleistocene age and should therefore be counted, alongside better-known fossils such as the Engis adult skull and the Red Lady of Paviland, as one of those early findings of Upper Paleolithic human fossil remains that took place before the 1868 discovery of the Cro-Magnon burials. However, unlike the material at Paviland and Engis, the Casa da Moura material’s age was correctly recognized and established by the discoverer.

Later revision of the Paleolithic artifacts from the cave identified Gravettian and Solutrean components. At that time, however, investigations