Pedra Furada
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- A series of 63 radiocarbon dates from the shelter built a sequence stretching from about 59,000 to 5,000 years ago.
- Excavators reported a symmetrical, hexagonal flaked stone, clearly shaped by people, in a layer dated to roughly 24,000 to 27,600 years ago.
- Ochre of the kind used for the paintings was reported from layers dated between about 17,000 and 25,000 years ago.
- Guidon first heard of the Piauí paintings in 1963, when a visiting mayor showed her photographs, but she could not reach the region until 1973.
- Guidon went further than most critics could follow, suggesting the first Americans might have arrived by boat from Africa, perhaps 100,000 years ago.
- Bearded capuchins in the park have the largest known tool kit of any wild capuchin monkeys, using stones to forage, dig and even display.
- The surrounding park covers about 1,291 square kilometres and holds the largest and oldest concentration of prehistoric sites known in the Americas.
- In 2013 the nearby Toca da Tira Peia shelter yielded stone tools dated by luminescence to around 22,000 years ago, adding weight to an early human presence.
- A tooth from the nearby Garrincho cave was dated to about 12,200 years old, one of several ancient human finds in the park's caves.
Why it is worth it
Pedra Furada, "the pierced rock", takes its name from a stone arch in the hills of southeastern Piauí, but its fame comes from the great rock shelter beneath the cliffs of the Boqueirão da Pedra Furada. It is the best known of the hundreds of prehistoric sites inside Serra da Capivara National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. A Franco-Brazilian team led by the archaeologist Niède Guidon began work here in 1973, and what they found set off one of the longest arguments in American archaeology.
In the shelter's floor the excavators found hearths with charcoal and quartz and quartzite pieces they read as stone tools. Radiocarbon dating put the oldest layers at roughly 48,000 to 32,000 years ago, and later series of dates extended the sequence further back. If people were here then, the idea that the Americas were first settled around the time of the Clovis culture, some 13,000 years ago, could not stand. Critics answered that the charcoal could come from natural wildfires and that the "tools" could be stones broken by falling from the cliff; one study even noted that wild bearded capuchin monkeys in the park smash stones and produce flakes that resemble early human tools. Guidon never accepted this and argued that fires are found only inside the shelters. The debate remains open, but the site is always part of it.
What is not in dispute is the rock art. The shelter and its neighbours hold hundreds of prehistoric paintings, dated to roughly 11,000 to 5,000 years ago; they show hunters' spear-throwers and darts but no bows and arrows. Guidon grouped the occupation into successive cultural phases named Pedra Furada, Serra Talhada and Agreste. Nearby caves in the park have yielded some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, including a young woman's skeleton around 9,700 years old found in 1990.
Getting there
The site lies inside Serra da Capivara National Park, about 26 km from the town of São Raimundo Nonato. The town has its own airport, São Raimundo Nonato (NSR), about 30 km away, but it has no scheduled flights; the nearest airport with regular service is Petrolina (PNZ), roughly 226 km away as the crow flies.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Pedra Furada is an important collection of over 800 archaeological sites in the state of Piauí, Brazil. These include hundreds of rock paintings dating from circa 12,000 years before present. More importantly, charcoal from very ancient fires and stone shards that may be interpreted as tools found at the location were dated from 48,000 to 32,000 years before present, suggesting the possibility of a human presence tens of thousand of years prior to the arrival of the Clovis people in North America.
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