After the first campaign of geophysics at Monte da
Contenda (where we discovered that the site is much bigger than previously
suspected), we started to clean the section made by the road that cut several
ditches (in the context of the project of Nia-Era to define and characterize
plans of ditched enclosures). Today we just roughly defined the section of one
of the outer ditches of the concentric set of ditches that we can see in the
geophysics (but others run outer of this one).
It needs a better definition of the profile,
but it is about 1,20 / 1,50 meters deep and about 2 meters wide (difficult to
define since the ditch was cut in the diagonal).
But what is more interesting is that the provided
materials suggest a Neolithic chronology (until now, the surface material pointed
to an exclusive Chalcolithic chronology), and maybe not a recent one: pot rims
are mainly from globular bowls, with walls “almagradas” (a red/orange clayish layer
in the pot walls). There is a lot of faunal remains that will allow radiocarbon
dating.
If this chronological attribution is correct, than the
site would have begun in Neolithic times and it would have been big since the beginning.
In fact, it would be the biggest Neolithic ditched enclosure with its plan know
in southern Portugal.
We shall see. This is, in fact, a quite promising
site.
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