Emotions at the surface

Ribeira de Piscos, and the role of emotionality in its establishment as the major Magdalenian site within the open-air Côa Region rock art complex (Portugal)

Abstract

After its dramatic appearance in 1995, with the threat of destruction by a dam counteracted by a worldwide preservation campaign, the open-air rock art in the Côa Valley region fully confirmed the high scientific expectations it raised, with a 30000 year long continuous rock art sequence starting in the Upper Paleolithic and up to the Modern Age. It is the world’s largest concentration of Upper Paleolithic open-air rock-art, definitely updating the previously established cave art paradigm within European Paleolithic art. With 20000 years of continuous Paleolithic diachrony, from the Gravettian to the Late Glacial and including the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, the site of Ribeira de Piscos is among the most important, mainly in the Magdalenian period, where it is the largest and arguably the most prominent site in the region. This text examines some particular figures in this site that display explicit and varied emotional aspects. Besides
the scarcity of this trait in Paleolithic art, it can be argued that they played an important role in the establishment and evolution of this site during the Magdalenian, and that this emotional aspect may have been symbolically essential in the definition of the site and its prevalence in the region.¹