Gates (or doors) are extraordinary important in any
architecture or space organization. Being a building (with gates or doors),
being a landscape (with its locals of passage that tradition preserved as
“Portelas”, a Latin word, or “Alvalade”, an Arab one). They are that specific
point where people cross borders between different meaningful scenarios, places
of transition, elements of orientation for pathways and mental reference in
construction of space, places to be defended or to be decorated or monumentalized.
They are so in the present and they were so in the past.
To ditched enclosures gates are a special issue, for
they can provide us with important information about the ideological background
that informed the construction of these sites. Namely, the gates show, in
several cases, in Portugal as in Europe, that these enclosures were built with
astronomic specific orientations, where gates played an important role: they are
facing important astronomic events, like the solstices or equinoxes.
We do not have in Portugal many enclosures where we
have information about the gates. We have that information for Perdigões, for
the sites of the project of geophysics that I developed in the context of my
NIA-ERA activity, for Santa Vitória, Outeiro Alto 2 and for a section of Alcalar.
I presented some of the architecture of those gates in an earlier post, where the
above image was posted.
Recintos de Bela Vista 5
Recently, in Senhora da Alegria was excavated another
strange gate (posted here) and after, in Bela Vista 5, three new gates could be
recorded. And although this is a latter enclosure, built in the last quarter of
the 3rd millennium, it seems to use gates in a way that we can track
to earlier moments in Chalcolithic: one is orientated to the sunset in the equinoxes,
and the two others are orientated to Summer solstice. And one has a semicircular
development by the outside (the “pinças de carangueijo”) similar to several
solutions we can observe in Perdigões, Moreiros 2 or Xancra, but at the same
time different: coming out of the ditch before the entrance interruption, it stops
exactly where the gate begins, not blocking a front entrance or visibility and does not create a lateral entrance as it happens in the other quoted examples.
It’s a clear example that these outside elements of
gates respond to intentions that are not easy to understand in their specific
motivations.
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