Archaeological missions to the Lagoa Santa region in the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

In the 1840s, Danish naturalist P. W. Lund found human remains mixed with the bones of extinct fauna species in the Sumidouro Cave near to the city of Lagoa Santa. After analyzing the conditions in which the bones had been deposited, he formulated the hypothesis of a possible coexistence of the "antediluvian" fauna and Man. At the time, that hypothesis was not taken seriously by European or North American researchers. In the twentieth century, however, various expeditions were sent to the Lagoa Santa karst to verify that possibility. None of those organized by the National Museum in the 1920s achieved any success regarding that point. However, amateurs from the nearby city of Belo Horizonte continued to discover human remains there (the Confins Man) and kept alive the international community's interest in the region. In 1954 and 1955, W. Hurt conducted excavations at Cerca Grande and dated the charcoal material he found to about 10,000 years ago. From 1971 to 1976, the Franco-Brazilian Mission headed by A. Laming-Emperaire excavated the Lapa Vermelha IV rockshelter, where it uncovered human remains (of a woman later named Luzia) that were dated to as 11,000 years old, under the remains of megafauna species that were a little more recent. In the following years, the excavations in the surroundings of Lagoa Santa were abandoned, although a team from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), that had begun to research new regions, continued to make sporadic surveys of the rock paintings in the karst.