assemblages were distinguished, dependent upon the amount of patina the artifacts had developed. Artifacts with similar patina were thought to have been deposited at the same time and were sorted as kinds of stratigraphic units of a physicochemical nature. The assemblages thus distinguished were organized in a chronological sequence, the oldest being those presenting the most-developed surface weathering. In the decades that followed, the few new accidental finds that were made were accommodated to this scheme, whose methodological foundations were not questioned until quite recently. As a result, Quaternary geology and Paleolithic archaeology in Portugal did not participate in the enormous progress that was made elsewhere in Europe in the postwar period.

Breuil and Zbyszewski’s scheme dealt mainly with the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. The Upper Paleolithic was largely ignored because of the dearth and poverty of cave assemblages, including the new sites excavated and studied by Jean Roche and O. da Veiga Ferreira in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Gruta das Salemas. Roche attributed this poverty to the fact that in the coastal areas of Portugal, the climate was temperate and humid during the Upper Paleolithic. This concept has been proven false by recent paleoenvironmental research, but it led Roche to believe that people lived mainly in the open and would only have used caves in exceptional circumstances. He may have been influenced by the fact that Manuel Heleno, then director of the National Museum of Archaeology, had discovered and excavated in the late 1930s and the early 1950s numerous open-air Upper Paleolithic sites in the Rio Maior and Torres Vedras areas.

However, these discoveries were never published, except via very short notices. Heleno was not an archaeologist in the modern sense of the word but a historian who wanted to establish the background of the “Portuguese nation.” Therefore, he was mainly interested in establishing, using the equation

type fossil = Paleolithic industry = Paleolithic people

that such a background was European, not African. This question had become relevant because of University of Oporto anthropologist A. Mendes Corrêa’s suggestion of a common background between the peoples of the Capsian and those of the Muge shell middens, where hundreds of Mesolithic burials had been excavated from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Corrêa’s concept of a Homo afer taganus as the origin of the Portuguese also had significant political implications during World War II, given the possibility of a German invasion and occupation of Iberia. In this context the identification of supposedly diagnostic lithic types among the assemblages recovered allowed Heleno to state that Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian were indeed all represented in the country. This was enough to establish the European affiliation of the Upper Paleolithic of Portugal, as he had hoped, making it unnecessary, from the point of view of his research design, to publish extensively on the sites he had excavated.

Paleolithic research in Portugal gained a new momentum only after 1975. The major political and economic changes experienced by the country since that time have helped to transform what was until then a field largely dominated by amateurs and a few university professors into an almost exclusively professional activity, most of whose practitioners are now in private consulting and in the heritage departments of the central and municipal administrations. With regard to the Paleolithic, this progress was mostly the result of the development of the careers of professionals who originally came together as a group of university students—the Grupo para o Estudo do Paleolítico Português (GEPP)—and of the establishment of collaborative projects with different French and U.S. colleagues. The work of a new generation fully integrated with the international mainstream of the discipline rapidly bore fruit. Among the recent and most spectacular products of this collaboration were, in 1994, the discovery of the Côa Valley complex of open-air Paleolithic rock-art and habitation sites, included in the World Heritage List in 1998, and the pivotal role played by Portuguese sites (especially the Lagar Velho child burial) in the debates about Neanderthal extinction and modern human origins in Europe.