REFUTATION OF STYLISTIC CONSTRUCTS IN PALEOLITHIC ROCK ART

This paper describes the first experiment of applying a series of dati ng methods at a single rock art site in a ''blind test''. The rock art in question, in northeastern Portugal, had been unanimously attribute d to the Upper Palaeolithic by stylistic comparison. Four independent assessments have produced the identical result that the rock art is in fact of the second half of the Holocene, and mostly under 3,000 years old. This finding is compared with other recent dating results which together show that stylistic dating is not an admissible method of det ermining the age of Palaeolithic art.