[60] Homo Sapiens appeared in Iberia in that part of the Old Stone Age known as the Upper Paleolithic. He was a hunter, and in Spain as well as in southern France left evidence of his genius as an artist. Such men came to Iberia from Southern France prior to 10,000 B.C., ⁽¹⁾ entering through the low passageway between the shore and the west end of the Pyrenees. Following the slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains, they went westward at least as far as Asturias. For this there is direct supporting evidence. It can hardly be doubted that they knew also the country beyond. They may, indeed, have entered and hunted along the Mediterranean shores of Spain as well, for the wall paintings of the eastern provinces from Lérida to Almería have been attributed to them.

However, this credit now seems undeserved, in the light of the paucity of apparel shown in the pictures and also by the appearance of the dog, apparently as a companion to the men. ⁽²⁾[61] The hunters of the Paleolithic lived in the late Glacial Period, whereas the semi-nudity of the figures depicted in the paintings of northeastern Spain does not suggest such a climate but rather that of a subsequent, warmer period of time. The appearance of the dog is also disconcerting to the enthusiasts for the Paleolithic identification of these people. It is generally agreed that the dog's domestication took place in the Epipaleolithic Period, that is, in the epilogue to the Paleolithic, when the climate was warmer due to the recession of the ice sheets and when a new type of culture had succeeded that of the brilliant hunters. Nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that the Upper Paleolithic hunters-and-artists ranged broadly across the peninsula at times, for their paintings (clearly of the same type as those of the great Cantabrian center of their art) are found in the center of the peninsula, as well as in the province of Málaga in the south. The evidence, however, suggests that their numbers were small beyond Cantabria.
 
 

While the hunters-and-artists of the Upper Paleolithic Period were living in the north, Capsian culture, ⁽³⁾ of a distinctly different basis and coming from Africa, spread into Mediterranean Spain. Between the two culture regions there was a "cultural abyss," according to Mendes Corrêa. ⁽⁴⁾ His expression is a good one if one keeps in mind that it indicates the existence of an intervening culture of a lower type, but it does not mean that the territory was uninhabited. People were living on the meseta (witness the traces of Magdalenian cave art in the provinces of Madrid and Guadalajara) ⁽⁵⁾ even though population was sparse. There is indisputable evidence that the meseta has been but thinly settled from as long ago as the middle of the second [62] millenium B.C. to the present, ⁽⁶⁾ and there is no reason to believe that earlier inhabitants either were more numerous or were lacking. It is reasonable to assume that the ancient ways of the Lower Paleolithic Period were continued by a thinly spread population, except where thrusts were made into the interior by the peoples of more advanced cultures from the northern and the Mediterranean fringes. This was the case in the west of the peninsula, where even such thrusts as those of the hunters may have been lacking. This land-end area was largely unaffected by changes taking place elsewhere in the peninsula. The record of the Upper Paleolithic is scanty; in Portugal there is very little to be so identified. Techniques of the Lower Paleolithic continued there, while migrants from northern and Central Europe and from Africa were bringing Upper Paleolithic techniques into the northeast and the southeast of present Spain. ⁽⁷⁾
 
 

It was toward the end of the Paleolithic Period that the west was drawn into a larger Iberian culture area by an intrusive ethnic wave of southern origin.
 

The evidence for this change is found at Muge, a site on the Tejo River about thirty miles northeast of Lisbon, where large shell mounds of the transition stage between the Old and the New Stone ages have been excavated and studied. The skeletons revealed are those of men of short stature and long heads, very similar to those of the Natufians of Mount Carmel and also closely similar to those of the Carthaginians, Libyans, and [63] Phoenicians. ⁽⁸⁾ This offshoot of a culture area stretching from western Asia across north Africa came into Iberia at the end of the Glacial Period, when modern climatic conditions were being established. Magdalenian hunters were either withdrawing northward or were being eliminated, due to the lack of the game upon which they had fed. ⁽⁹⁾ At Muge, Epipaleohithic people lived within reach of the tide, where their food was to be had, ⁽¹⁰⁾ making their characteristic small geometric flints, until they were overwhelmed by subsequent migrants. There is no satisfactory agreement as to how this elimination took place. Guiart ⁽¹¹⁾ believes that the Muge people were pushed to the north, to become part of the stock of the present province of Beira. Mendes Corrêa believes that it was a north European stock that eliminated or absorbed them. ⁽¹²⁾

In northern Iberia at approximately the time of the prosperity at Muge another Epipaleolithic group, the Asturian, dominated a narrow coastal band fronting on the Atlantic from Bayonne, in southwest France, to the area at the mouth of the [64] Douro River in Portugal. ⁽¹³⁾ These Asturians found their living along the sea-edge by prying shellfish from the rocks with hand-axes, made by chipping the ends of water-worn cobbles. That they were not the same people as those of Muge is evident from the fact that at Muge the hand-axes of the Asturians were lacking. Nor were they Magdalenians, at least not those of the great hunting and painting stage. They may have represented a pauperized remnant of Magdalenians, or they may have represented a continuing remnant of a substratum of Lower Paleohithic stock which had been overlaid by Magdalenian culture. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Or they may have represented a transition culture between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, ⁽¹⁵⁾ perhaps a transition between the cultures of the north and the south.
 

During the period of time in which the Asturian culture flourished in the north, peoples of the Neolithic entered and developed their culture along the Mediterranean coast of Iberia. ⁽¹⁶⁾ In its early years this culture clearly showed influences of the makers of the small geometric flints, but pottery makers and agriculturists were at work, and other Neolithic influences from the eastern Mediterranean were increasingly evident, coming both by land through North Africa and by sea along the Mediterranean. This culture, having strong African traits, with a pastoral base but also with rudimentary farming, affected [65] a large part, perhaps all, of the peninsula. It was, however, chiefly along the Mediterranean coasts that it was important. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Again Portugal remained largely to one side of the stream of events, showing nothing more than a slight infiltration of elements of the more advanced culture. Discoveries there of the early and even of the full Neolithic are few. ⁽¹⁸⁾
 

At the beginning of the third millennium B.C., the Metal Age came to Iberia through the migration of a Saharan group, which established itself in the area of present Almería. This culture complex included from the outset articles of copper, especially a large number of weapons. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Almería culture spread into Andalusia on the one side, and into the valley of the lower Ebro River on the other. It may have been the foundation of what later became known to the Greeks as Iberian culture. At least from that time onward, in this area there is no evidence of any ethnic change of importance until the time of the first historical record, when the Greeks encountered the Iberian Tartessians and other littoral peoples of the south of the peninsula. ⁽²⁰⁾ Obviously this does not prove direct connection and lineal descent of the Iberians from the Almeríans, but as Mendes Corréa points out, the assumption is not unreasonable even though there is no direct evidence. ⁽²¹⁾
 

About a thousand years after the appearance of Almería people, came the dramatic appearance of great stone burial structures. Many authors refer to a Megalithic culture, but as Pericot has pointed out, in view of its distribution and of the diverse peoples and cultures involved -- e.g., the herders of the Cantabrians and Pyrenees as well as the agriculturists of the Guadalquivir valley -- it can hardly be called a culture. It is better to refer to the Megalithic phenomena. ⁽²²⁾ This cult use of great monoliths with capstones for burials, called dolmens (from two Breton words meaning "stone" and "table" ) , involves thousands of such structures and brings western Iberia to the center of the stage for the first time. There are especially great numbers of them in northern Portugal where their construction probably spanned a period of time from the late Neolithic Age into the Bronze Age.⁽²³⁾ It is argued by many Spanish and Portuguese scholars that their point of origin is to be sought within the Iberian Peninsula. ⁽²⁴⁾ If concentration of numbers is the basis of decision this argument is a strong one. However, it ignores the existence of far older Neolithic dolmens [67] of Palestine, apparently built in imitation of earlier habitations. ⁽²⁵⁾ Whatever may have been the place of origin, certainly the development of the cult seems to have been of basic importance in Iberia, from where certain local features spread to northern Europe on the one side and along the Mediterranean on the other. ⁽²⁶⁾

Toward the end of the Bronze Age another feature, almost surely of Andalusian derivation, the campaniform vase, spread widely throughout Europe. ⁽²⁷⁾ This source of contact, as well as those of the cult associated with the dolmens, created a bond and an interchange between the peoples of Iberia (including Portugal, which so frequently has stood out of touch with European developments) and wide areas of the rest of Europe, as well as with the eastern Mediterranean shores. Whether the dolmens originated in Portugal, Spain, or elsewhere, is less important here than the fact of the obviously important contact between western Iberia and the world of Europe and western Asia during the early Bronze Age.

In southern Portugal, as a variation upon the sepulchral structures of the other Portuguese Megalithic, there developed a special type of dolmen, named for the site of Alcalá and hence called Alcalar. Instead of monoliths supporting the great slab on top, pillars were made of small stones, either fitted or cemented together. The precise dating of these dolmens can not be given. They may have been coexistent with those of the middle and the north of Portugal, or they may have developed later, representing a continuation of the traits of the early Bronze Age into a period of time when much of the remainder [68] of the peninsula was far more advanced in the use of metals and in agricultural techniques.

Actually, it is not always possible to speak positively in the comparison of peninsular regions and the time of their development. Throughout Iberia the problems of chronology and sequence are great. At various periods of time there have been cultures of greatly differing stages existing near each other. For example, in the later Bronze Age of other Western European countries much of Portugal remained in the stage in which copper was dominant. It did not really take part in the full Bronze Age developments. In fact, in Portugal there is a notable hiatus in the record between early Bronze Age developments and those of the second Iron Age, the latter intrusive from Central Europe and taking root among early Bronze Age cultures. Such unconformity does not exist through most of the rest of Iberia. ⁽²⁸⁾ For example, in Spain the period of dolmenic phenomena was also one of a flourishing agriculture, as well as one of an increasing use of metals. ⁽²⁹⁾ Portugal, the site of great energy in the construction and elaboration of the structures themselves, did not keep pace in other respects with the neighboring parts of the peninsula. Portugal not only lagged in the use of metals, but probably in the advancement in agriculture. Barley at least was cultivated, ⁽³⁰⁾ but there is no evidence to show that agricultural development in general was anything but meagre.
 

Portugal lost subsequently even the energy of its period of dolmen construction and then drifted into what seems to have [69] been a cultural backwater. It scarcely took part in the splendid, basically Mediterranean culture, the Argaric, which brilliantly developed techniques in the use of silver, copper, and bronze. This culture, named for the site of El Argar in southeast Spain, spread into southern and northeastern Spain and even into the Balearic Islands, but in Portugal only into the Algarve. ⁽³¹⁾ Although Portugal gained very little from these developments which took place elsewhere in the peninsula, she did contribute raw materials to them. Such middle and late Bronze Age finds as have been made in Portugal are all related to the distribution of metals. During the period of Argaric culture, the copper of South Portugal was exploited. In a later period of the Bronze Age the tin of North Portugal became important. The south, with most of the copper deposits of Portugal, and the north, with most of the tin, have yielded remains of Bronze Age axes, whereas the Center, lacking for the most part both of these metals, is almost entirely devoid of the ax remains. However, none of the finds later than those of the dolmenic period suggest local developments or inventions. All indicate that they were of foreign provenience and that they were intrusive into an otherwise little changed older culture. ⁽³²⁾

1. Luis Pericot García, La España primitiva, p. 111.

2. Júlio Caro Baroja, Los Pueblos del Norte de la Península Ibérica, p. 28

3. Pedro Bosch Gimpera, "Los Iberos," Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 7.

4. A. A. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 105.

5. Pericot García, La España primitiva, p. 68.

6. Juan Maluquer de Motes, "Los Pueblos de la España cèltica," Historia de España, Tomo I, Vol. III, Pt. 1, 10.

7. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 104.

8. Jules Guiart, "Anthropologie des populations dolichocéphales de l'Europe Méridionale et de l'Afrique Septentrionale," Congresso do Mundo Português, XVII, 374.

9. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 109.

10. The Lutraria compresa upon which they subsisted is not found beyond tidal range. As the tide now does not reach within twenty miles of this area, it is obvious that there has been a change. Perhaps the land has risen in the ten thousand years since the culture flourished. Ibid., p. 107. Júlio Martínez Santa-Olalla (Esquema paletnológico de la Península Hispánica, p. 48) would shorten the time span to from six thousand to eight thousand years. Or perhaps sedimentation has altered the area in such fashion that the water is now fresh. See J. Carríngton da Costa, "Evolução do meio geográfico na Pré-história de Portugal," Congresso do Mundo Português, I, 50.

11. Guiart, "Anthropologie des populations dolichocéphales," Congresso do Mundo Português, XVII, 384

12. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 139.

13. Probably slightly later than the period of settlement at Muge. See Martínez Santa-Olalla, Esquema paletnológico, p. 49; Caro, Los Pueblos del Norte, p. 40; Abel Viana, "Os Problemas do Asturiense Português," Congresso do Mundo Português, V, 170; Hermann Lautensach, "Die diluviale Umwelt des Menschen in Portugal," Congresso do Mundo Português, XVIII, 748-749.

14. Pericot García, Las Raices de España, p. 27.

15. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 115.

16. According to Pericot García (La España primitiva, p. 112) the Neolithic phenomena started about 5000 B.C. The full Neolithic in Spain may be dated from 3500 to 2000 B.C. Martínez Santa-Olalla, Esquema paletnológico, p. 53.

17. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

18. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 116.

19. Alberto del Castillo, "El Neoeneolítico," Historia de España, Tomo I, Vol. I, Pt. 4, 523, 571.

20. Bosch Gimpera, "Los Iberos," Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 6; Hugo Obermaier and António García y Bellido in El Hombre prehistórico y los orígenes de la humanidad, pp. 258-259; Juan Maluquer de Motes, "Pueblos Ibéricos," Historia de España, Tomo I, Vol. III, 306.

21. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 155.

22. Pericot García, La España primitiva, p. 144.

23. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 118.

24. The phenomena were widespread. But from where did the idea come? One finds proponents for theories of origin for any of the countries from Portugal to those of the eastern Mediterranean. Mendes Corrêa ("A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 140) suggests that it might have been Portugal. Obermaier and García y Bellido (El Hombre prehistórico, p. 174) agree fundamentally with him. Martínez Santa-Olalla (Esquema paletnológico, p. 59) points to southeast Spain. Bosch Gimpera says ("Los Iberos," Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 14) that the Megalithic culture in Portugal owed its origins to an indigenous non-Capsian culture but with Capsian infiltrations from the south, Andalusia, and the mesetas of Spain, this mixture constituting the basis of the pre-Celtic indigenous population of Portugal which appeared later as the historical Lusitanians. Pericot suggests (La España primitiva, p. 146) that the idea of the Megalithic tomb was introduced into Iberia in simple form, perhaps in several places, and in these different places took its diverse forms. Carleton Coon expresses the idea (The Races of Europe, p. 490) that the phenomena were the result of the spread by maritime Mediterraneans.

25. W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, Penguin Books, p. 64. Pericot (La España primitiva, p. 146) favors the idea of eastern origin.

26. The simple architecture of present North Portugal is strongly reminiscent of that of the dolmenic period.

27. For the European distribution, see Obermaier and García y Bellido, El Hombre prehistórico, p. 171. The campaniform vase, presumably of Andalusian derivation, has been found in many Portuguese sites, although, strangely, not in the Algarve, the adjacent Portuguese area usually thought to be culturally closest to Andalusia, and but few in the Alentejo. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 130.

28. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I, 146-147.

29. Martínez Santa-Olalla, Esquema paletnológico, pp. 59-60.

30. Jorge Dias, Os Arados Portugueses e as suas prováveis on gent, p. 92.

31. It probably did not spread beyond the Algarve in Portugal, although there have been isolated finds in the Alentejo. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," Histónia de Portugal, I, 148; Bosch Gimpera, "Los Iberos," Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 42, 44.

Bosch Gimpera, "Los Iberos," Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 43) dates it 1900-1200 B.C. Martínez Santa-Olalla, on the other hand, shortens the span (Esquema paletnológico, p. 61); his dates are 1500-1200 B.C.

32. Mendes Corrêa, "A Lusitania pré-romana," História de Portugal, I,