RICHARD BRADLEY and RAMO ´ N FA ´ BREGAS VALCARCE CROSSING THE BORDER: CONTRASTING STYLES OF ROCK ART IN THE PREHISTORY OF NORTH-WEST IBERIA Summary. Rock art can be regarded as a specialised form of material culture, and at the regional scale it may have exhibited as much diversity as monuments and portable artefacts. Its character might also have changed in relation to different practices and different ways of perceiving and using the landscape. Such contrasts can be identified in the prehistoric rock art found on either side of the modern border between Portugal and Spain and may be related to much broader currents in Iberian archaeology, extending from the Atlantic to the West Mediterranean. NORTH AND SOUTH Iberia occupies a distinctive place in studies of European prehistory, but its archaeology poses problems. Whilst no-one would deny its importance in the main patterns of development, form the adoption of megalithic tombs to the Roman wine trade, it is located on the margin of the continent and the evidence from this area is sometimes difficult to integrate into a more general narrative. The archaeology of the Atlantic coastline has posed particular problems, for it is at the same time one of the great seaways of the prehistoric world and the edge of Europe as a whole. Thus it is that phenomena like megalithic art, Maritime Beakers or the Atlantic Bronze Age form self-contained fields of study, separated from one another by long periods of time when this region is overlooked. The situation is especially unfortunate in the case of the Iberian Peninsula, for this is where the Atlantic seaway met the Mediterranean and was one of the areas through which important ideas seem to have passed (Figure 1). This was especially true in the Copper Age and Early Bronze Age, one of the few periods in which regional sequences in Spain and Portugal occupy a prominent position in accounts of European prehistory (Coles and Harding 1979, 214– 39). They do so because of the unexpected developments that took place in south-east Spain, which is among the regions of the continent with evidence for fortified settlements, rich burials and precocious metal production. Some of these features appear again on the Atlantic coast of Iberia, and most particularly around the Tagus Valley in Portugal (Chapman 1990). There has been some discussion of the relationships that may have existed between that area and regions as far away as Ireland (Harrison 1974; Eogan 1990; Almagro 1995), but with this emphasis on long distance relations there is a OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 17(3) 1998 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 287