IFRAO position on Guadiana

Robert G. Bednarik auranet@optusnet.com.au

Guadiana petroglyphs

These petroglyphs have now been lost forever

This tranquil scene is now submerged

Recording of one petroglyph among the tens of thousands the Portuguese Institute of Archaeologhy condemned to destruction

Statement by the President of IFRAO
May 2001

Having failed to appreciate the existence and importance of the Guadiana rock art in the many years the region's archaeology has been investigated, the Portuguese authorities are at last making an attempt to correct their oversight and to record the rock art before it is to be inundated by the Alqueva dam. IFRAO welcomes this belated, eleventh hour endeavour, but expresses concern about the adequacy of this effort.

If the Guadiana rock art is to be destroyed, the very minimal requirement would be that its recording is done in accordance with the best possible current practices of rock art recording. The results of the current work are only acceptable to the international community of rock art specialists if they meet the following minimum requirements:

1. In addition to traditional recording, all panels must be recorded by fully detailed geomorphic cartography of the type introduced by Francois Soleilhavoup or Guillermo Munoz.
2. All archival colour photography must be calibrated with the IFRAO Standard Scale for future colour re-constitution.
3. All engraved figures must be characterised by multivariate micro-topographical indices as those used by Laila Kitzler or Franco Urbani.
4. All motifs must be surveyed and recorded by digitised micro-topography with structured lighting according to the method by Duilio Bertani and colleagues.
5. The rock art panels need to be surveyed by an appropriate geomatic method permitting full digitisation, preferably by traversing laser system or the Kirsch and Kirsch method of photogrammetry, corrected by bringing fiducial points in the stereo pairs into correspondence.
6. Any well-preserved abrasion petroglyphs need to be surveyed by internal analysis as developed by Alexander Marshack, and the types of tool points used in their manufacture need to be determined.
7. All lichen thalli in the immediate vicinity of rock art are to be measured lichenometrically, their relationship to the petroglyphs must be fully recorded, and the species need to be determined.
8. A representative sample of the Guadiana rock art must be subjected to direct dating attempts, using any of the presently available methods.
9. A representative sample of the rock art is to be subjected to detailed field microscopy to establish technological details, to study weathering processes, accretionary deposits, superimpositions, and any microscopic traces or residues assisting in the interpretation of the rock art.

If these requirements are not met by the recording program currently undertaken, the eventual results of the program will be rejected internationally as inadequate, as scientifically worthless and as amateurish.

Robert G. Bednarik
President of IFRAO

During the subsequent nine months, none of these conditions were met by the recorders of the rock art, and the great bulk of it was never recorded by even the most rudimentary methods. The inundation of the rock art commenced in February 2002, and by June the major concentration at Cheles has been lost.

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