His major international development in this area, though, was awarded at the International Congress of Anthropology in Amsterdam in 1927, and established a parallel between the archaic alphabetic inscriptions found in Alvão (Trás-os-Montes) with similarly controversial inscriptions in Glozel (France), contesting the exclusive origins of the Phoenician alphabet in Europe preceding other numeric primitive writing systems, even exhorting the existence of a dynamic lithic Western civilization.

In his historiographical work, where the primacy of anthropological research led him to apply positivist and deterministic guidelines, history was conceptualised as a non-cyclical science resulting from the multiple factors that influenced human reality, and thus historical facts should be analysed by historians in a highly critical way, drawing on input from other sciences to complement their authenticity. The importance of national history in the civic and political training of Portuguese people was also overemphasised, their teachings either a '”precious archive of lessons and, above all, stimuli” or the nationalist and patriotic dimension being "the strongest guarantee of our independence (Antropologia e História, 1954).

On the overriding path of the search for the anthropological roots of the Portuguese people he entered into an intellectual controversy on the origins of nationality with Damião Peres (with whom he collaborated on História de Portugal during his time at the 1st Faculty of Arts of Porto), by conceding the Lusitanians as a primordial ethnogenic element in the formation of the Portuguese people, challenging the theory of nationalism as a firstly political construction in favour of the deterministic geographic and ethnic framework, which reinforced the idea of antiquity and Portuguese specificity in comparison with other European peoples.

In addition to the extremely long list of conferences, lectures, awards, commendations and honorary titles, both Portuguese and foreign, from Europe, South America and Africa, Mendes Corrêa was also a full, corresponding and/or honorary member of more than thirty cultural and scientific associations, including chairmanship of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, academic member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon and the Portuguese Academy of History, honorary member of the Spanish Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory and full member of the Pontificia Academia Scientiarum.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | (Pdf)