National and international experts in the field of archaeology and palaeontology participate on December 15 and 16 in Leiria at the conference “O Menino do Lapedo – 20 years later”, integrated into the celebration of the discovery of that finding.
The celebration program was announced today by the Câmara de Leiria and is aimed at “valuing one of the most important archaeological finds in Portugal”, in a partnership between the municipality and the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage.
An international conference in Leiria, an exhibition in Croatia, the production of a documentary and the launch of a book are some of the initiatives planned for 2019.
On December 15 and 16, the Leiria Museum hosts a series of lectures by internationally renowned lecturers such as João Zilhão (University of Barcelona, Spain, and Archeology Center, University of Lisbon, Portugal), Erik Trinkaus (University of Washington, St. Louis, USA), Juan Luis Arsuaga (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain), Johannes Krause (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany), Eugénia Cunha (University of Coimbra, Portugal) and Paul Pettitt University of Durham, UK).
The conference “O Menino do Lapedo – 20 years later” also includes guided tours by experts at the archaeological site of the Abrigo do Lagar Velho, National Monument since 2013. In parallel, a children’s book about the “Lapedo Boy” will be launched.
The two decades of archaeological discovery are also featured abroad at the exhibition “The Lapedo child and other stories from Old Rock Shelter,” which opens on December 2 at the Museum of Archeology in Zagreb, Croatia.
The exhibition is open until February 24 and includes two films that promote the discovery and the scientific work developed.
In this project developed for the Museum of Archeology in Zagreb, the rock art of the Côa Valley will also be highlighted.
In the context of the celebrations, new fieldwork was carried out in Abrigo do Lagar Velho this summer, involving an international team and led by the Archeology Laboratory of the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage.
‘Lapedo Boy’ was found in 1998, in Abrigo do Lagar Velho, in the Lapedo valley, parish of Santa Eufémia, about ten kilometres from Leiria.
The skeleton is about 29,000 years old and was a remarkable event in international paleoanthropology, as it was the first Paleolithic burial excavated in the Iberian Peninsula.
