---
title: "At Penascosa, 27,000-Year-Old Pigments Ask Whether the Côa’s Engravings Once Had Colour"
description: "Hundreds of mineral fragments in Portugal’s Côa Valley push human presence past 27,000 years and reopen the question of lost paint"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-02T22:25:00Z
modified: 2026-11-03T04:19:43Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/at-penascosa-27-000-year-old-pigments-ask-whether-the-coa-s--6b0543
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "portugal", "art", "pigments", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# At Penascosa, 27,000-Year-Old Pigments Ask Whether the Côa’s Engravings Once Had Colour

*Hundreds of mineral fragments in Portugal’s Côa Valley push human presence past 27,000 years and reopen the question of lost paint*

By Jan Sokol · November 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/at-penascosa-27-000-year-old-pigments-ask-whether-the-coa-s--6b0543

## In brief

- Côa Parque Foundation archaeologists found hundreds of yellow, red, black and brown mineral pigment fragments at Penascosa, Portugal
- The deepest layer, from the late Gravettian, dates human presence to more than 27,000 years, beyond the previous 26,000-year limit
- Finds include stone-tool debris, hunting tools, leather-working traces and hearths
- Thierry Aubry suggests some engravings may once have been painted, but no direct link between pigments and rock art is proven
- Lab analyses will trace pigment sources within about 60 km, and digging resumes in early spring

For three decades the Côa Valley in Portugal has been known by its lines. Horses, wild cattle and other animals were cut and pecked into the rock faces by Paleolithic hands, thousands of them, and the stone has kept them. A line is a stubborn thing. Once it is cut, only the slow wearing of the rock itself can take it back.

Colour is not stubborn. Rain carries it off. Heat and frost loosen it. Erosion finishes the work. So when archaeologists dug at Penascosa, one of the valley’s best-known sites, and found hundreds of fragments of mineral pigment in yellow, red, black and brown, in layers older than 27,000 years, the question they raised was simple. Were the engravings we see today all there ever was, or only the part that lasted?

## Eight square metres

The excavation, [as Leman Altuntaş reported for Arkeonews](https://arkeonews.net/27000-year-old-pigments-could-change-what-we-know-about-portugals-famous-rock-engravings/), was run by the Côa Parque Foundation under its scientific coordinator, the archaeologist Thierry Aubry. The team worked for several months near the rock surface catalogued as Number 3, with students from the University of Lisbon alongside them. The trench was small: about eight square metres. Out of it came iron oxides and other natural minerals, the raw material of colour.

![A textured illustration shows a horse carved into a cave wall above an excavation pit containing red, yellow, brown, and black pigment stones.](https://rews.cc/img/f18ccdc3c3fa28a2a305a23b89afc6f4d04f80c6.webp)

The deepest layer belongs to the final phase of the Gravettian, a period of the Upper Paleolithic. Aubry [told the Portuguese news agency Lusa](https://www.diarioviseu.pt/2026/10/31/novas-descobertas-arqueologicas-podem-mudar-narrativa-da-arte-do-coa/) that human presence at Penascosa may now reach back more than 27,000 years, beyond the 26,000-year limit accepted until now. A thousand years, give or take, recovered from a patch of earth the size of a small kitchen.

## The work of ordinary days

What the trench held was not only colour. There were traces of stone-tool making, hunting weapons, the working of leather, the remains of hearths. People knapped flint here, prepared their weapons, scraped and treated the hides of the animals they killed, and sat by fires. Penascosa, the finds say, was a place where people lived and worked, not only a gallery. Aubry has stressed that the excavation tells something about how continuously people occupied the valley and how many different things they did there.

It is the usual fate of ordinary life to vanish from the record while its monuments survive. The engraved horse outlasts the hand that cut it, the meal, the fire, the coat made from the hide. Here, for once, a little of that ordinary life has come back up out of the ground.

The pigments belong to that everyday world too, and nobody yet knows exactly what they were for. Aubry suggests they may have been mixed into adhesives or used in treating hides, which were turned into clothing, coverings and other necessities of hunter-gatherer life. Pigment might have coloured those skins. No published analysis yet ties the Penascosa fragments to any such use.

![A woodcut-style illustration shows hands rubbing red pigment into an animal hide with a stone, beside a bowl of pigment and a stone flake.](https://rews.cc/img/8bff6ea60e07c7fa512228bcdfe51413713408e5.webp)

## Paint and the weather

The other possibility is art. The visible images of the Côa were made by incision and pecking, and the new finds show that the people who made them also had in hand the minerals needed to paint. Aubry points out that painting and engraving often went together in prehistoric art. He proposes that some Côa figures may first have been painted and later strengthened with incised lines, a combination that would have helped coloured images last longer out in the open.

His reasoning rests on a hard fact of conservation: scratches can endure for thousands of years, while paint can be stripped away by rain, swings of temperature and erosion. If he is right, a large share of the valley’s original painted art may simply be gone.

The caution matters as much as the hypothesis. The pigments prove that colour was present at Penascosa. They do not prove that any particular engraving was painted, or that paint came before the cut. The colour may just as well have gone onto hides or other organic materials, and those have rotted away too, leaving the picture of Paleolithic art and life in the valley full of holes. The site has lost things before, though not to weather alone: in July 2025 Aubry [explained](https://www.diarioviseu.pt/2025/07/13/arqueologos-intensificam-investigacao-sobre-presenca-humana-no-vale-do-coa/) that it had been hard to establish how far the engraved rocks extended, because schist was later quarried there to build weirs and walls along the Côa. Archaeology elsewhere has learned to read such absences, as with the Neanderthal wood in a Catalan rock shelter that [survives only as the shape it left behind](https://rews.cc/a/in-a-catalan-rock-shelter-neanderthal-wood-survives-as-the-s-0a6034).

![Rain streaks across a dark rock face bearing an outlined horned bull, with rusty red pigment dripping from its body into rippling puddles below.](https://rews.cc/img/98b7a62253f0bab399e1e214b52ccf56278b6fc8.webp)

## Sixty kilometres

The next step is the laboratory. Different surfaces, Aubry says, leave different marks on pigment particles, so analysis could show whether a given grain touched rock, hide or something else. The team estimates that natural sources of the minerals lie within about 60 kilometres of Penascosa, but cannot yet tie any fragment to a particular deposit. Mineral analyses now under way are meant to close that gap.

The foundation has presented preliminary results at a scientific seminar in Algeria. It plans to return to Penascosa in early spring, [Notícias de Coimbra reported](https://www.noticiasdecoimbra.pt/descobertas-recuam-presenca-humana-no-vale-do-coa-para-la-dos-27-mil-anos/), to look for more pigment and to study the context and use of the materials in closer detail.

## The counting

States like to count what they protect, and the count here keeps growing. When the archaeological park was created in 1996, about 190 rock surfaces bearing art had been recorded. The foundation’s current figure is roughly 1,600, with more than 15,650 motifs across 104 archaeological sites. Portugal made the rock art a national monument in 1997; UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 1998.

Every one of those figures is a line, because lines are what the stone kept. The question the eight square metres at Penascosa now put to the laboratory is whether the people of the Gravettian saw their horses and cattle in grey schist, or in red and yellow and black that the weather has spent 27,000 years washing away.