him to conclude that the action of carnivores alone could not explain this set of characteristics and that they were evidence of cannibalism. In his era this behavior was commonly attributed to the “Celtic” peoples who inhabited Europe in pre-Roman times, as Delgado pointed out by extensively quoting such recognized authorities as jacques boucher de perthes, Laying, or Huxley and Spring, whose excavations at Chauvaux had led to similar conclusions.

He would develop this argument further based on the results of his later excavations at the Middle Paleolithic and Neolithic cave site of Gruta da Furninha, which he reported to the 1880 Lisbon conference. Applying a taphonomic approach to the issue of cannibalism, he completely excavated the deposit, carefully sieving all the sediments and taking note of the spatial distribution of the bones inside the cave. This enabled him to present quantified observations and to substantiate his arguments on differential body part representation with a statistical table of the counts for each skeletal part from each of the loci discriminated during the excavation. These showed, for instance, not only that several bones were not represented in the proportions they have in the human skeleton but also that such differential preservation was true for the distal and proximal parts of the same bone. Delgado conceded that there could be sample bias in the case of the smaller skeletal elements and that the low representation of spongy bones could be due to their greater perishability. However, he thought the other features of the assemblage, together with the breaks, burns, and supposed cut marks on the bones, could only be explained by human action. He therefore concluded that the deposit comprised the remains of cannibal meals.

Although this conclusion was accepted by some of the authorities present at the congress and subsequently proven true through chemical analyses showing that the bones had indeed been burned, the majority of the committee appointed by the congress to settle the issue did not agree with Delgado. Among his opponents were de Mortillet and emile cartailhac. The latter rightly objected that the evidence instead suggested that people had been buried in the cave, not eaten there. Similar phenomena had been observed in dolmen burials and could be easily accounted for by the action of carnivores or the practice of successive burial, which would disturb and damage the bones from previous interments. However, the point to note once more is that, right or wrong, Delgado had pushed observation beyond the practices current in his time. This was recognized by the committee itself, which recorded in its proceedings a unanimous appreciation of the rigorous methodology of his work and of the statistical treatment of his data that it allowed, in an attempt to establish specific characteristics of bone assemblages that could be correlated with specific animal or human behaviors. Coupled with experimentation and extended to ethno-archaeological contexts, this is what archaeozoologists and taphonomists still do today. Delgado therefore deserves to be more widely recognized not only as one of the earliest excavators of Upper Paleolithic sites and first finders of Upper Paleolithic human fossils but also as a pioneer in the geo-archaeological study of cave deposits and in those related fields that play such an important part in contemporary paleolithic archaeology.

The tradition begun by Ribeiro and Delgado of doing Paleolithic research within the framework of the normal mapping activities of the Geological Survey was not continued until the middle of the twentieth century. The onset of World War II took henri breuil to Portugal, where, accompanied by Zbyszewski, a geologist of Polish origin who would settle in the country, he undertook a systematic survey of the Quaternary deposits along the coast and the main river valleys. As a result they produced a detailed cultural stratigraphic scheme of the Portuguese Paleolithic.

This scheme contained several weaknesses. On the one hand it was based on a strictly altimetric interpretation of both the raised beaches and the river terraces. On the other hand it was largely based on the type fossil system of interpreting certain kinds of artifacts as representative of whole industries. Furthermore, almost all of the sites studied consisted of surface scatters or mixed colluvial deposits in which different