The Woman Who Discovered “Eden”

By Petro, Pamela

Brazil’s “Marie Curie of archaeology” refuses to dig and run TO MOST SOUTH AMERICAN and European scientists, Niede Guidon, Brazil’s most famous archaeologist, is the Marie Curie of contemporary archaeology. To some Brazilians and North Americans, she is a hot- tempered maverick. To those who have scrutinized her record and methods, she is the purveyor of a different, “holistic” archaeology. Above all, she is die patron saint of Pedra Furada (“Pierced Rock”)- a towering limestone formation in Serra de Capivara National Park, called by many the “Eden of the Americas,” in northeastern Brazil’s remote state of Piaui.

Guidon first saw photos of rock paintings there in 1963, but poor travel conditions stymied attempts to visit them. In 1964 a military coup made her flee to Paris and graduate studies at the Sorbonne. It wasn’t until 1970 that she viewed the red-ocher line paintings in person: deer leaping, turtles, jaguars, women and men kissing, dancing, hunting-images clustered beneath cantilevered rock in a semiarid landscape much like the U.S. Southwest.

She thought the paintings were 1,000 years old, but tests revealed them to be over 10,000. She began digging at the base of the greatest cluster, and at five meters found a cache of lithics- stone artifacts-and hearths containing charcoal residue dating to 25,000 years before the present (BP). Based on earlier discoveries in Clovis, N.M., archaeologists believed humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than 11,500 BP, so Guidon thought there had been a mistake and had her samples retested. This time, one of the best labs in the world dated them to 50,000 BP.

When she announced her findings, all archaeological hell broke loose. A U.S. team dismissed her findings in the journal Antiquity- a savage report that French archaeologist Danielle Lavallee termed “an almost visceral rejection.” That was in 1994. Since then, Guidon has effectively disputed their arguments through painstaking fieldwork. Furthermore, world opinion about the arrival of the First Americans has changed: Even conservative archaeologists now speculate this may have occurred between 15,000 to 30,000 BP. But where does that leave the much older Pedra Furada? According to Tom Dillehay, a co-author of the Antiquity article who now regrets having overreacted, the site may forever remain “contaminated by doubt.”

Not if Guidon can help it. Now age 74 and walking with a limp (she broke both knees on a 1998 dig), she’s recently discovered human remains, yet to be dated, in a cave beneath stalactite secretions. But her legacy may reside less in the past than the present and future. For her, Capivara is a continuum: a place where people lived millennia ago and live today. She’s stayed in Piaui, Brazil’s poorest state, for more than 30 years, creating the national park and then persuading UNESCO to make it a World Heritage site. Despite death threats from poachers, she’s established jobs, schools and hospitals for local people, built a state-of-the-art museum and a hotel, and created a nonprofit foundation to run the park.

“Unlike the rest of us,” says Dillehay, “she’s refused to dig and run.” That’s Guidon’s contribution to the present. Her Pedra Furada excavations may yet rewrite the past.

-PAMELA PETRO

Copyright Liberty Media for Women Summer 2007

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