The First American Scoop: The Pedra Furada

Controversy in Newspapers (1978–2015)

Miquel Carandell Baruzzi∗

Abstract. In July 1986, the cover of Nature featured rock paintings from the Pedra Furada rock shelter
in the Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil. In that issue, Niède Guidon, head of the excavations at
Pedra Furada, co-authored an article that pushed back the arrival of the first humans to South America
to 32,000 years ago. This controversial claim was widely reported by newspapers in Brazil and in other
countries like the USA. Using this case, this paper aims to shed light on the role of newspapers in prehistory
in three different ways. Firstly, it will analyze how Guidon’s early outreach effort helped to transform the
Serra da Capivara research into a well-known scientific project in Brazil – a project that tried to protect
and economically promote this area, promoting at the same time the disputed claims. Secondly, this paper
will highlight how Guidon’s research adapted to the logic of the media by using the rock paintings at Pedra
Furada as ‘legitimators’ of the idea of an early human presence in the shelter. And thirdly, this paper will
emphasize how newspapers became the platform for the scientific debate that took place before, during
and after the discussion in more traditional scientific media. All this will help to provide insight into how
newspapers became a crucial agent in the construction of late 20th century prehistoric knowledge.

Keywords. Archaeology and media, Brazil, First Americans, Niède Guidon, Pedra Furada, rock art

1. Introduction

In 1978, excavations at the Pedra Furada rock shelter began. This was one of the most
significant sites of the hundreds of archaeological and rock art sites in the Serra da Capivara
National Park in north-eastern Brazil, in the Piauí state, a very isolated region and one of the
poorest in the country. Later, the French-Brazilian archaeologist Niède Guidon presented
evidence of human settlement in the rock shelter that she dated as twice as old as the widely
accepted view of the presence of modern humans in the Americas. This claim caused a
heated debate among archaeologists, as it reopened the long lasting debate on the peopling
of the American continent (Meltzer, 2015).
This paper will try to draw a chronological account of Pedra Furada and Guidon’s story
while raising some issues that will help to give greater insight into both this Brazilian story
and also, more generally, how archaeological knowledge can develop within the public
space of the newspaper page.

∗ Centre
d’historia de la Ciencia CEHIC, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Modul de Recenca C Carrer
de Can Magrans, s/n Bellaterra, Barcelona 08193, Spain. E-mail: m_baruzzi00@hotmail.com

Centaurus 2016: Vol. 58: pp. 239–256; doi:10.1111/1600-0498.12120

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240 M. Carandell Baruzzi

Looking at the case of Pedra Furada, and archaeology in general, from this perspective
means the concept of ‘medialisation’ of science becomes extremely useful. With the need
to secure funding, scientists increasingly present their research in the media, following
its interests and its logic. In these cases, the way that knowledge is presented in public,
conditions and shapes scientific practice itself: Science is ‘medialisated’ (Rödder, Franzen
and Weingart, 2012; Hochadel, 2013, pp. 26–27, 160–164). Likewise, ‘derivation’ occurs
when scientists skip the established protocol of scientific work and communicate directly
with the general media, strengthening claims that could be controversial in the scientific
media (Bucchi, 1998). In this ‘medialisated’ and ‘derivated’ science, as Shinn and Cloı̂tre
put it, ‘expository practices’ used by scientists in front of their publics ‘play an active role
in the knowledge production process’ (Shinn and Cloı̂tre, 1985, p. 32).
Using these frames, this paper wants to analyse the characteristics of the Pedra Furada
popularization and how it helped to build disputed claims. The discussion will be divided
into three sections. The first section, from the 1960s to 1986, will explain the origins
of Pedra Furada’s rock shelter excavations and Niède Guidon’s intellectual and scientific
background. This section will analyse how the outreach effort performed by Guidon and
her team, helped to transform Pedra Furada, and more generally the Serra da Capivara
Park, into a well-known ‘archaeological brand’ (Holtorf, 2007; Hochadel, 2013, pp. 35–72;
Carandell, 2015, pp. 61–65). Perhaps even more important for Guidon than the fundraising
potential of creating a Serra da Capivara Park brand, this paper will argue, was the potential
the branding offered for Guidon to gain the support of Brazilian society for her initiatives,
and, therefore, for her controversial claims. The second section, from 1986 to 1993, will
deal with the publication of Guidon’s claims in Nature. The reactions to this publication
will be described and the initiatives promoted during this period will also be outlined. It is
of special interest for this paper to analyse the role that Pedra Furada’s rock paintings
played in advancing Guidon’s claims. The rock art filled the void left by an absence
of iconic human bones or human-made remains that are the usual attention attractors at
archaeological excavations. This meant that the scientific research was adapted to account
for the visual nature of the media, and specifically newspapers (Nieto-Galan, 2011, p. 244).
The third section, from 1993 to 1996, will address an international conference organized
by Guidon and, especially, the reactions of some of the American scientists in attendance.
The scientific debates that developed before, during and after this conference soon spread
to the newspapers. In this section, the emphasis will be on how newspapers became the
main arena for these scientific debates (Clemens, 1986). This public scientific disagreement
allowed the press to go on to present the scientific arguments that helped to support one
position or the other.
The reason for giving each of these three points its own section, is practical: to improve
synthesis and comprehension. Yet, these points are, in fact, general issues that could
be raised in any of the different phases of this story to understand it as a whole. To
illustrate this view I have therefore included a final fourth section, which deals with the
‘resurrection’ of the claims surrounding Pedra Furada that occurred between 2013 and

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2015. This section will act as a means to highlight the transversality of the points raised,
as well as a conclusion.
Despite its hagiographic overview of Guidon’s life and achievements, the book ‘Le
Secret de la Roche Percée’ written by the French journalist Elizabeth Drévillon, has been
useful to chronologically reconstruct the story and to gain insight into Guidon’s thoughts
from her own testimony (Drévillon, 2011). Newspapers and magazines from Brazil, but
also from France, Spain, the USA, the UK and some other countries, have been other main
sources. The analysis focuses on the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. During
the second half of the 1980s, the period in which the story begins, this newspaper had
the largest circulation among big Brazilian dailies and had a wide influence on the whole
country as a channel for generating public opinion (Wikipedia Contributors, 2016a). The
influence was especially strong as Brazil had only recently been released from a long period
of dictatorship (Fausto, 2014, pp. 312–318). Television coverage is less significant for the
current discussion as it did not provide such wide coverage of the debate around Pedra
Furada, and it is also more difficult to access. The few television items that have been
sourced were made only from Guidon’s perspective (GloboCiência, 1990; TV Nordeste,
2009; UNESCO Representação do Brasil, 2013).
Some secondary literature has been published on the Pedra Furada story or on similar
cases. The archaeologists Antonio Carlos Andrada and Lennon Oliveira Mattos published
an article in which they analyse Guidon’s nationalistic discourses regarding Pedra Furada
and questioned how she constructed a ‘local narrative’ that benefited her and prevented
the exchange of information on the site. Yet this article does not look at the role of
newspapers in this phenomenon, and it also does not analyse how scientific practices
themselves move to the popular media (Andrada and Mattos, 2013). In some of his articles
commenting on Brazilian archaeology more widely, Pedro Paulo Funari superficially
comments on Guidon’s controversial claims and popularization efforts (Funari, 1994;
Funari, 2000). More recently, the anthropologists Ricardo Ventura Santos and Verlan
Valle Gaspar Neto published an article that treated the case of the human cranium ‘Luzia’
and its ‘sociocultural appropriations’ in Brazil’s public domains. This article has proved
very useful when writing this paper as it provides a very good framework to deal with
Brazilian contemporary public archaeology (Neto and Santos, 2009). There is also some
literature on Brazilian science popularization, public archaeology and archaeological
tourism (Funari, de Oliveira and Tamanini, 2007; Funari, Manzato and Alfonso, 2013;
Lima, Neves and Dagnino, 2008).

2. The Origins of the Brazilian ‘First American’

Niède Guidon is a French-Brazilian archaeologist born in 1933, who, after studying

Biology in Brazil, left for Paris in 1961 to briefly study archaeology at the Sorbonne.
There, she had as professor the well-known archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire,

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who, according to her own testimony, had a great influence on her (Drévillon, 2011,
p. 30). On a number of occasions Laming-Emperaire visited South America to perform
archaeological research, following Paul Rivet’s theory that the continent was populated by
migrants who sailed there from Australia and Melanesia (Lavallée, 1978; Funari, 1994,
p. 27). In the early 20th century, North American archaeologists claimed that the earliest
human presence on the continent was the so-called ‘Clovis culture,’ named after a site
in New Mexico that was no older than 12,000 years. According to this theory the ‘First
Americans’ arrived on the continent by crossing the Bering strait. Yet, from the moment
this theory was formulated, other scientists claimed to have found older sites and different
routes. Since then, the earliest population of the Americas has been a matter of debate, to
which Rivet’s theory was yet one more approach (Lynch, 1990; Meltzer, 2015).
In 1963, after 2 years in Paris, Guidon went back to Brazil where she got a position
in the Archaeology Department of the Museu Paulista, one of the most visited São Paulo
museums (Wikipedia Contributors, 2016b). In 1964, the political situation in Brazil became
very complicated. In March of that year, the Brazilian army general Humberto Castelo
Branco came to power after a military coup, which initiated a dictatorship that lasted, with
changes, for 20 years (Fausto, 2014, pp. 280–292). Early on in the dictatorship, according
to her own testimony, Guidon was advised that she was on the black list of people dangerous
to the dictatorship, so she decided to return to Paris (Drévillon, 2011, p. 35). In France,
Guidon first became Laming-Emperarie’s assistant and later got a permanent position at
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where Emperarie initiated an
American prehistory seminar devoted to the problems of the continent’s ancient population
(Lavallée, 1978; Drévillon, 2011, pp. 36 and 66).
In 1970, the political situation in Brazil changed and Guidon went back to her home
country (Drévillon, 2011, pp. 66–69). There, she visited the so-called Serra da Capivara
for the first time. In the following years, Guidon, together with her team from the EHESS in
Paris, classified hundreds of sites with archaeological remains and rock art in the Serra da
Capivara area. In 1978 a site called ‘Toca do Boqueirão da Pedra Furada’ was discovered
and, after excavations were performed there, this site became the flagship of Guidon’s
research and claims (Drévillon, 2011, p. 78). In Brazil, newspapers reported the initiation
of the research, highlighted the importance of the rock paintings and the necessity of their
preservation (Lapouge, 1975; Tarso-Costa, 1975; Teresina (Correspondente), 1978). As
the well-known Brazilian magazine Veja emphasized in a four-page report, the Serra da
Capivara had ‘The most important rock-paintings set of South America’ (Leitao, 1978).
In 1978, an exhibition on Serra da Capivara’s rock art and a series of talks titled ‘Rock
Art from the Piauí region’ were presented in the Paulista Museum (Redação Folha, 1978;
Redação Folha, 1979). In the early 1980s, some scientific articles on Serra da Capivara’s
human occupation and rock art were published in France (Guidon, 1983; Guidon, 1984).
These articles claimed ancient human habitation of the shelter on the basis of stone
tools and dated charcoals from apparent ancient hearths (Guidon, 1984, pp. 270–271).
These claims of the great antiquity of the human presence in the shelter also appeared in

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newspaper reports. In May 1983, the Folha announced that the remains found in Pedra
Furada, particularly carbon from an apparently human-made prehistoric fire, had been
dated in Paris using the Carbon-14 dating method to be 31,000 years old. These results were
presented in newspapers and magazines as ones which ‘changed the American colonization
theory’ or that ‘Collapsed a [Clovis] theory’ (Figure 1) (Belik, 1983; Redação Veja, 1983).
These research claims were associated from the very beginning with a desire that the
discoveries be popularized. According to Drévillon’s book, Guidon ‘wants to share her
[discoveries] with the entire world, and prefers to communicate with the press before
[scientific] publication’ (Drévillon, 2011, p. 90). Through the French journalist, Guidon
presents herself as a non-conformist, as someone that does not comply with standard scien-
tific practices and fights against the ‘closed universe’ of archaeological science (Drévillon,
2011, p. 90). As sociologist and historians of science have noted this kind of self portrait is
not innocent and hides aims regarding the acceptance of specific scientific claims and the
achievements of political, economic and popular support for these claims (Goodell, 1977).
The raising of funds to fulfil these aims became a central tenet of Guidon’s discourses
as the Brazilian government rarely provided the Serra da Capivara National Park with
enough resources to be maintained. Guidon therefore had to actively seek funding, which
she did through her public appearances. The popularization of Guidon’s research rested
on a powerful ‘lack of funding’ discourse that was used to promote not only conservation
of the natural environment but also the archaeological site itself, and ultimately, Guidon’s
scientific claims (Belik, 1986; Drévillon, 2011, pp. 111–113, 234–235).
During the story, Guidon herself wrote newspaper articles, which helped her to publicly
visualize her research and therefore gain the attention of politicians and the general public
(Guidon, 1979, 1988). This attention was crucial for winning further financial support.
From then on, the way that claims around Pedra Furada were presented, discussed and
established depended not only on scientific media but also on its popular stance. The first
steps to the ‘medialisation of science’ were being made (Rödder, Franzen and Weingart,
2012). The active popularization transformed Pedra Furada into a famous Brazilian
‘archaeological brand’ (Holtorf, 2007). As the Folha headline read, the Serra da Capivara
was becoming: ‘the biggest archaeological site of the Americas’ (Belik, 1984).

3. Rock Art Helps to Raise the Pedra Furada Brand

Everything changed in June 1986. That month, the British journal Nature published an
article by Guidon and a French collaborator on her findings at Pedra Furada. In this article,
Guidon presented evidence, mainly ‘abundant lithic industry’ dated through Carbon-14,
that pushed back the arrival of the earliest inhabitants of South America to 32,000 years
ago: The early inhabitants of the Americas were twice as old as previously thought
(Guidon and Delibrias, 1986, p. 769). The cover of that issue of Nature was devoted to
Pedra Furada’s rock paintings with the title ‘Early Man in South America.’ Together with

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Fig. 1. Guidon herself reported on Piauí findings (Guidon, 1979).

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other findings, the publication of this article reopened the long-lived debate around the
prehistoric colonization of America and caused an academic debate that was reported in
newspapers and popular magazines over the next few years (Whitley and Dorn, 1993,
p. 626). The Pedra Furada findings were clearly another challenge to the Clovis theory,
a challenge trumpeted on the front cover of Nature no less. As a newspaper article put it
after reviewing some Pre-Clovis sites, ‘but the oldest and certainly the most controversial
of these discoveries is Pedra Furada’ (Vincent, 1994).
Active proponents of the Clovis theory like the North Americans David Meltzer from
the Southern Methodist University; Thomas F. Lynch from Cornell University; as well as
Brazilian based or related scientists like Betty Meggers, from the Smithsonian Institution
and well-known for her work in South America; André Prous, a French archaeologist
who worked in the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and Walter Neves, from the
Universidade de São Paulo, strongly opposed Guidon’s claims in both scientific articles and
newspaper appearances.1 At the same time, scientists like Ruth Gruhn and Alan L. Bryan
from the University of Alberta, who performed early man excavations in Venezuela, or
Warwick Bray from the University of London Institute of Archaeology supported Guidon.2
This situation started a debate that lasted some years, and mainly unfolded on the pages
of the archaeological journals Antiquity and American Antiquity. In the public domain, the
front cover of Nature meant that the scoop of how the Americas had been inhabited by
humans earlier than previously thought travelled beyond Brazilian borders and received
considerable attention from the English speaking world, France and Spain. While The
New York Times ran the headline ‘Far earlier evidence of humans in the Americas,’ Le
Monde recognized the interest in Guidon’s research by the archaeological community and
the Spanish La Vanguardia described in considerable detail the characteristics of Pedra
Furada’s different layers (Figure 2) (Wilford, 1986a; Rebeyrol, 1986; De Torres, 1986).3
In Brazil, newspapers and magazines reported the finding, which was nicknamed
‘Homem do Piauí’ after the state in which the site is situated.4 The Folha used the headline
‘Nature reports on the discoveries made at Piauí’ and, a year later, emphasized that Pedra
Furada was ‘the oldest site on the American continent’ (Agências Internacionais, 1986;
Sucursal da Campinas, 1987). From then on, the popular media was the place where new
data on the ageing of the human presence in the shelter was announced often before the
scientific publication: in June 1989 a Radiocarbon date of 47,000 years old was reported
(Do Enviado especial a Campinas, 1989; Guidon and Arnaud, 1991), in October 1991
the Folha announced that the ‘human presence’ in the area ‘reached 60,000 years old’
(Leite, 1991a; Guidon et al., 1996) and by 2008, Guidon claimed that humans first came
to America 100,000 years ago or even before (Pivetta, 2008; Guidon, 2008). Some months
after the Nature article was published, Guidon and her team founded the Fundação Museu
do Homem Americano, a foundation that promoted scientific research, the preservation
of archaeological remains and the natural environment, the promotion of the area as a
tourist destination and the improvement of local living conditions (Drévillon, 2011, p. 155;
Fundação Museu do Homem Americano, 2014). That same year, 1986, the foundation

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246
M. Carandell Baruzzi
Fig. 2. The Folha reports Piauí findings with special emphasis on the Pedra Furada rock-paintings (Belik, 1984).
 Pedra Furada 247

started to build a museum, protected the Pedra Furada site and adapted it for visitors
(Reportagem Local, 1986). Later it promoted the construction of an airport near the
sites, organized scientific conferences, published a scientific journal and even started an
agreement with a the Federal University of Vale do São Francisco to create an archaeology
graduation course (Drévillon, 2011, p. 136, 155 and 187).
These three different directions of Guidon’s and the foundation’s aims – to promote
tourism, to preserve the area and to popularize their scientific research – are closely linked
and should not be dealt with separately. The press was useful for all three aims. Throughout
the story’s development, the press devoted articles to tourism in the Serra da Capivara, to
the necessity of preservation of the natural environment and archaeological sites and, of
course, to Guidon’s scientific claims (Tarso-Costa, 1975; Belik, 1986). The press proved a
useful arena for attracting public attention and raising funds to finance the foundation’s
aims. For instance, in June 1997, the tourism section of the Folha devoted two whole
pages to the Serra da Capivara highlighting its ‘natural beauty and historical discoveries,’
commenting on these findings and their datings and, at the end of the piece, presenting the
accommodation options in the area to the reader (Moi, 1997).
But there was a problem, the lack of iconic remains. As was already pointed out, claims
for the ancient occupation of Pedra Furada were purely based on the dating of charcoal
that came from ancient inhabitant’s hearths and were associated with stone tools (Guidon
and Delibrias, 1986, p. 769). There were no bone remains of that age left. The relevance
of these kinds of iconic remains in the diffusion of certain scientific theories and ideas has
already been pointed out. The famous skeleton Lucy and its exhibition all around the world
is maybe the best example of the importance of this kind of powerful physical remains
(Coppens, 2012, p. 65; Hochadel, 2013). But there was nothing like this in Pedra Furada.
The only iconic image was the site’s rock paintings, according to the Nature article, dated
to be 17,000 years old (Guidon and Delibrias, 1986). This rock art, however, fulfilled the
visual requirements of some of the newspapers. The Folha stated that ‘the discovery of
rock art and other archaeological vestiges [ … ] dated with Carbon testing to 32,000 years
old’ and pictured the paintings several times (Belik, 1984; Reis, 1986; Damato, 1993).
In The Times, a journalist stated that ‘before 30,000 years ago cave art was being painted
in Brazil’ (Hammond, 1986). In 1987, Guidon herself wrote an article for the American
magazine Natural History as part of a series of articles called ‘The First Americans,’ in
which different archaeologists published their views on the issue. Guidon’s article was
titled ‘Cliff Notes,’ with the subtitle of ‘Rock artists may have left their mark on Brazil
more than 30,000 years ago’ and it also featured an image of the paintings (Guidon, 1987).
In 1991, the Serra da Capivara was inscribed as a UNESCO heritage site. The Serra da
Capivara section on the UNESCO internet site, which features a big detailed picture of
the paintings, states that ‘over 300 archaeological sites have been found within the park,
the majority consisting of rock and wall paintings dating from 50,000-30,000 years Before
Present’ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 1992–2016). So, what this paper is trying to
highlight is that rock paintings, their association with the early inhabitants of the continent

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248 M. Carandell Baruzzi

and their visual use in the press and in other media, helped to reinforce the more apparently
ambiguous claim of the early date. The paintings offered a visual and also a physical
support to Guidon’s claim. These Archaeological findings, like any other activity capable
of generating news, were adapted to the logic of the media when used as palpable evidence
and a visual icon (Rödder, Franzen and Weingart, 2012). They were the physical entity that
could support the claim, while at the same time being something that could be reproduced
and be attractive for an audience. Yet, what is more interesting in this case, is that this
‘logic of the media’ was not only followed by newspapers, but also by a purely scientific
publication like Nature. Even here, the visual power of the paintings became a crucial
support to Guidon’s controversial claims.

4. The Reunião Internacional sobre o Povoamento das Américas: A

Public Scientific Debate

At the start of 1993, new data on the Pedra Furada stone tools caught the attention of
the world’s media (Damato, 1993; Bahn, 1993; Lemonick, 1993). The Folha devoted two
whole pages to the data, which included an interview with Guidon and with André Prous.
The article began with Prous’ interview in which he defined himself as ‘agnostic’ regarding
the claims made in Pedra Furada, he questioned the evidence presented, voiced his doubts
with regards to the human origin of both the supposed stone tools and the charcoal dated
and stated that the problem with Guidon’s claims are not the excavations but the way that
they are interpreted. Then Guidon answered the journalist’s questions, some of which were
based on Prous’ arguments, like how to refute the idea that the stone tools could not be
human-made. Guidon then suggested that the critics should first examine the site and see
the evidence in situ before voicing criticism. The site visits, Guidon argues, will finish the
controversy, as everybody will see how the excavation was performed and the evidence
extracted. Finally, a brief comment written by the journalist was devoted to Prous’ answer
to Guidon’s ideas. Prous did not believe it either useful or necessary to visit the sites in
order to have an opinion, as said opinion, Prous believed, could be based on published
material (Reportagem Local, 1993). It is easy to see how the journalist asked questions
directly based on the other side’s argument. The Perda Furada scientific debate was taking
place beyond the academic circles (Figure 3).
In December 1993, Guidon and her team organized a major international conference,
called ‘Reunião Internacional sobre o Povoamento das Américas,’ in the Serra da Capivara.
Some of the most prominent scientists engaged in the debate, from both sides of the
dispute, were among the attendees. As well as Guidon’s own team, attendees included
the Ameriacan Robson Bonnichesen from the Texas A&M University; Dena F. Dincauze
from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; David Meltzer; Tom Dillehay from the
University of Kentucky who directed the Monte Verde excavations in Chile where claims
of ancient habitation had been made; James Adovasio from the Mercyhurst College and

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Fig. 3. The Folha reported extensively on the Piauí Man debate (Reportagem Local, 1993).

director of the Meadowcroft rock-shelter research where supposed pre-Clovis remains

had also been found; Richard MacNeish the previous director of the Robert S. Peabody
Foundation for Archaeology who by this time had retired; the French researchers Jacques
Pelegrin from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Claude
Chauchat from the Université Paris 1; and the Argentinians Juan Schobinger from the

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Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and Gustavo Politis from the Universidad del Centro de
la Provincia de Buenos Aires.
The Conference was widely reported in the press, where it was presented as the
‘definitive consecration’ of Guidon and the Piauí Man (Gurovitz, 1993; Redação Estado,
1993; Vincent, 1994). The Folha highlighted that, for the first time, foreign scientists would
examine the sites and have direct access to the evidence, although it also pointed out that
some of the major critics to Guidon’s claims, like Prous, failed to attend (Gurovitz, 1993).
Again, these reports gave voice to the confronted scientists. Guidon highlighted that all
the gathered scientists had agreed the need to review the Clovis model and stated that
Dena Dincauze, was the only attendant who was cautious about the evidence from the site
(Gurovitz, 1993).
After the conference, three of the American attendees, Meltzer, Dillehay and Adovasio,
published an article in the prestigious archaeological journal Antiquity (Meltzer, Adovasio
and Dillehay, 1994). Although these scholars did not voice outright rejection of Guidon’s
claims during the conference, in this article they articulated their concern regarding,
‘whether the [dated] charcoal is truly anthropogenic.’ They went on to say that [we]
‘cannot accept the claim’ that Pedra Furada stone tools ‘are artefacts’ as the ‘weight
of evidence and reason forces us to assume’ that they are not human-made. In making
this statement, these scholars accused Guidon and her research team of having made
several methodological mistakes during the Pedra Furada excavation (Meltzer, Adovasio
and Dillehay, 1994, pp. 702, 709–713). These new accusations attracted the attention of
international newspapers which featured quotes from the Antiquity article, statements by
some of the critics of Guidon’s research and also highlighted that the new statements had
been made after visiting the site (Wilford, 1995; Hammond, 1995). Some of these news
pieces started with strong sentences like ‘serious doubt has been cast on the antiquity of
South America’s most controversial archaeological site’ (Hammond, 1995). In the Folha,
Guidon and Walter Neves, who had not attended the Conference, exchanged a series of
‘Letters to the Editor.’ In his letter, Neves highlighted the ‘methodological mistakes’ made
by Guidon’s team and hoped to be convinced by ‘new scientific publications’ and not by
‘heterodox strategies’ performed by Guidon in a clear example of what Thomas Gieryn
called an ‘exclusion type of boundary work’ (Neves, 1995; Gieryn, 1999, pp. 15–16).
Guidon answered in the same newspaper by listing the reasons why the American
researchers, and Neves, were wrong in their interpretation of the findings (Guidon, 1995).
Guidon and her team did not publish this list until a year later (Guidon et al., 1996).
After the three American researchers’ accusations in Antiquity, and the public discussion
both in Brasil and in the international media, interest in Guidon’s claims seemed to
wane during the late 1990s. In Brazil, the academic journals and newspapers turned their
attention to the reconstruction of ‘Luzia,’ a very attractive icon for the media (Neto and
Santos, 2009). As Neves’ position shows, somehow the great popularization effort made
by Guidon during all those years turned against her when the three American researchers’
criticism gained visibility. This ultimately led to more criticism from colleagues in Brazil

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and probably also contributed to the media’s loss of interest in the subject (Neves, 1995;
Funari, 2000; Andrada and Mattos, 2013).
In this third section we have seen how the press became a setting for scientific debate
before, during and after new data on the findings appeared. Scientists stated their opinions
in the media and detailed accounts of both parties’ evidence were presented. This process
shows how the press became a scientific means of communication and at the same time,
how the Conference, and the supposedly closed discussions among experts, spread to the
public arena (Carandell, 2015, pp. 103–143; Clemens, 1986). The decisions regarding
whether the claims made around Pedra Furada had to be accepted or rejected were not
only made within the scientific community but also in the public press.

5. Conclusions: The 21st Century Piauí Man

In 2013, the French archaeologist Eric Böeda, Spanish archaeologist Ignacio

Clemente-Conte and other researchers joined Guidon on a new research project in
Pedra Furada and nearby sites. In an article in Antiquity, these scientists together with
Guidon claimed that new evidence of human-made stone tools pointed to occupation of
the region being ‘more than 20,000’ years ago, dated in France using both radiocarbon
and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating techniques (Boëda et al., 2014, p. 927
and 935). Due to the contentious nature of these claims, Antiquity asked some scholars
to write a reply, which was rounded off by a reply from the article’s authors. Despite
some respondents pointing out important problems with the procedures, the replies were
positive, giving at least ‘the benefit of the doubt’ to Böeda and colleagues, if not claiming
that the stone tools were indeed ‘undoubtedly’ used by humans.5 Again, the article, and
even the specialists’ replies attracted the attention of some popular media in Brazil, the
English-speaking world, France, and Spain. Again The New York Times used the headline
‘Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans’ Arrival in the Americas,’ Le Monde quoted
Guidon and Böeda, and the Spanish El País reported the lack of resources for the Serra da
Capivara park (Romero, 2014; Mortaigne, 2015; Bedinelli, 2014).
The way newspapers dealt with these new, but at the same time old, claims repeated
some of the points that this paper has tried to point out regarding Guidon’s earlier claims.
First, all the popularization performed by Guidon and her team over the last 30+ years
was used to reinforce the present claim and begin to rebuild the archaeological stance of
the site. So, while the newspaper pieces highlighted the new research, Guidon’s past story
was quoted in order to show how these claims had been made (and debunked or ignored)
for years, giving to newspapers a role in the legitimation of the new Böeda research
(Sotos and Madridejos, 2015). Likewise, Guidon’s previous use of the media as a means
to gain funding for the park (and so the research), which had proved so successful that
Pedra Furada became probably the most known archaeological research at the time in the
country, demonstrated that a recognizable research project can help scholars gain further

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252 M. Carandell Baruzzi

financial and popular support for projects (Hochadel, 2013; Carandell, 2015). Second, once
this structure was created, the way that new evidence is presented does not only follow
scientific logic but also media logic. In this instance, the visual and physical stances of
the claims are crucial as evidenced by the rock paintings on the Nature front cover or in
several newspaper pieces. The 2013 research project popularization, despite the evidence
presented, was really based on the analysis of the stone tools from the area. Here, rock art
once again made an appearance in several of the newspaper pieces when it was thought that
a visual element would make the article stand out (Aranda, 2014; Sotos and Madridejos,
2015). Therefore, special interests as well as necessities shaped how the research was
presented in the media (Rödder, Franzen and Weingart, 2012). Finally, as was the case with
the original story, the scientific discussion jumped from the pages of scientific journals
into the popular media which reproduced the debate and also presented new statements
of the involved scientists, who defended their positions in public (Lopes, 2015; Romero,
2014). Like Murray Goulden’s description in his paper on the Flores Man, the Pedra Furada
story demonstrates how scientific communication must be understood as something very
complex and part of scientific practice itself (Goulden, 2013; Gregory and Miller, 1998).
In the case of Pedra Furada the newspapers not only reproduced what was discussed in
the scientific media but also provided new evidence and points to the debate. In that sense,
newspapers acted not only as communication channels but also as an additional setting in
which the nature of certain scientific claims was discussed.
To sum up, this paper has tried to show, through the Pedra Furada case study, how
newspapers play a role in the way that specific claims are presented to society and to other
scientists. Consequently, this case study shows how newspapers are also spaces where the
fate of these claims, their political and economic support, and also their scientific support,
is, at least partially, decided. Thus, in order to know how knowledge is being constructed,
newspapers should be considered. As this whole special issue demonstrates, if we want to
understand how archaeological science works, we must not forget its public stance, and
more specifically, its presence in printed news media.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Oliver Hochadel for making me discover the Pedra Furada story,
Boris Santander for teaching me so much about it, Eduardo Natalino dos Santos, Ignacio
Clemente, Antonio Carlos de Andrada and Nisa Trinidade Lima for providing me with
valuable hints on Niède Guidon and the anonymous reviewers for improving the final
version of the paper.

NOTES
1. Bonalume, 1986; Redação Folha, 1986; Meltzer, 1989; Lynch, 1991; Meltzer, Adovasio and Dillehay,
1994; Neves, 1995 and Prous and Fogaça, 1999.

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 Pedra Furada 253

2. Bray, 1986; Gruhn, 1987 and Gruhn and Bryan, 1991.

3. More examples are: Hammond, 1986; Wilford, 1986b; Guidon, 1987; Jurado-Centurión, 1988; Brooke,
1990 and Leite, 1991b.
4. For instance: Reportagem Local, 1986; Reis, 1986; Redação Veja, 1986, 1987; Sucursal da Campinas,
1987 and Redação Estado, 1988, 1991.
5. Problems: Dillehay, 2014 and Schmidt and Bueno, 2014. ‘Benefit of the doubt’: Feathers, 2014, p. 949;
‘Undoubtedly’: Forestier, 2014, p. 946.

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