0326 – Portuguese ditched enclosures in intercontinental project

After obtaining the approval and funding for a FCT project on mobility, the enclosure of Perdigões (but also others that were researched by Era Arqueologia, like Bela Vista 5 and Porto Torrão) will be part of an intercontinental research project on prehistoric mobility. The project, titled “Beyond migration and diffusion: The prehistoric mobility of people & ideas”, is funded by the Australian Research Council and has a leading team composed by Catherine Frieman, Rainer Grun, Matthew Springgs, Rachel Wood (from Australian National University), Mathieu Duval (from Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre Evolución Humana, Spain) and António Valera (Era Arqueologia, S.A.).

The main goal is to see how the movement of individuals and groups of people is both an instigator and a response to sociocultural change, utilizing both key European and Pacific Island examples to help build a truly comparative archaeology of rapid social and economic change, with pertinence to general theories of innovation and adoption.

0271 - Bela Vista 5 monography

It is edited the nº2 of ERA MONOGRÁFICA dedicated to the cerimonial enclosure of Bela Vista 5 (Beja, South Portugal).

Free download here

0268 – Transition moments

Transition is always a moment celebrated by cultures (and not just human cultures). Transition between life and death, between childhood and adult life, between seasons, between day and night, etc. All generate particular culture behaviors, rituals, prescriptions.

Even architecture responds to these moments of transition. That is the case of many ditched enclosures by having their gates orientated to important sun annual events, such as solstices and equinoxes. In this case, we have a drawing of the landscape perspective of the sunset at the equinoxes, seen through the western gate of Bela Vista 5 enclosure (Beja, South Portugal).

0249 – Hemp in Bela Vista 5 enclosure

At the pit grave inside the inner enclosure of Bela Vista 5 there was a Palmela arrow head that was part of the funerary assemblage. That arrow was deposited over a hank of strings. Part of the strings were preserved attached to the arrow’s surface due to its oxidation.

Palmela point with strings attached to it (photo by António Valera)

Analysis show that the strings were made of hemp. This was an interesting finding. Hemp is originally from Asia, but it seems to have spread over Eastern and Central Europe during Neolithic and Chalcolithic. In Iberia there was a context from Late Chalcolithic that provide a textile made of hemp at Abrigo de los Carboneros, but the context have some problems.

Now, at the Bela Vista 5 enclosure hemp appears in a well preserved and excavated context, with a radiocarbon date from the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC.

Bela Vista 5 funerary context (image published in Valera, 2013)

It is the most western context with hemp in European Recent Prehistory, and might be a confirmation of Sherrat’s ideas about the quick spread of hemp associated to Bell Beaker (Bela Vista 5 grave is a late Bell Beaker context, associated to what is traditionally designated in South Portugal by “Horizonte de Ferradeira”).

The publication of this context will be done in a monographic study that will come out shortly, edited by Nia-Era..

References

Valera, A.C. (2013), “Recintos de fossos da Pré-História Recente em Portugal. Investigação, discursos, salvaguarda e divulgação”, Almadan, Segunda Série, 18, p.93-110.

0188 - The importance of gates

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. 

0136 – Enclosures as funerary chambers ?

That seems to be the case of the inside small ditched enclosure of Bela Vista 5. The small enclosure has inside just one pit used to bury a woman, together with three pots, a pricker and a “Palmela” arrow head (so much for the “male worrier” theory for “Ferradeira horizon” graves). It is dated from the last quarter of the third millennium BC, contemporaneous of the process of the filling of the ditch.

It is interesting to notice that the pit grave is not at the centre of this small enclosure, just with 6/7 m diameter, but in a side, like it frequently happens in megalithic chambers. In fact, the all context, announcing a new world with new perspectives regarding individuality, steel suggests a memory of Neolithic times, inclusive with evidences of body manipulation after the first deposition. The inner enclosure seems to have been built to receive this grave, and the outside ditch reveals practices that can only be understood in the context of a highly ceremonial activity (see previous post on Bela Vista 5).

All of this for one woman? If so, she was an important one, no doubt.

PS – The data from this sites and reflexions on the problems that it raises will be presented next February, in ERA annual meeting. Monographic publication will follow.

0131 - Enclosures in meetings

The enclosures of Senhora da Alegria (left) and Bela Vista 5 (right) will have their first public presentations next February, in the annual meeting of ERA Arqueologia. The first site have an important sequence from Early Neolithic to Late Neolithic (and some punctual occupations afterwards); the second is from the beginning of Bronze Age and presents a ceremonial context in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic tradition.

0127 - Bit by bit

This is the way the outside ditch of Bela Vista 5 was done. Not at once, but by a sequence of short ditches, that were overlapped and are different in depth and thickness, as we can see from the different profiles obtained in several areas (an image from the archaeological report in preparation) and from the distribution of stone concentration in the surface of the sequence.

In some of them we can see evidences of re-cutting.

 

Naturally this delimitation has no functionality for defence or water circulation or other more practical goal. The sections were made to be filled (and some were filled before the next section was opened). And they are filled with stones and pottery shards: no faunal or human remains, no stone tools, no loom waits were recovered in the surveyed areas of this “ditch”. Just pottery, showing a clear selection of a particular category of material.

Faunal remains appear in some of the inside pits. The inside small ditch, on the contrary has some faunal remains associated to the pottery shards, and enclosures an area with just a pit grave. All the data from this enclosure points to a place of highly ritualized practices.

After the report is complete we intend to publish a monographic paper on this important site.

0111 - Re-excavating ditches

Sections of the outside ditch at Bela Vista 5:a previous layer was excavated in the centre and after refilled with other deposits.

This is, in a certain way, another version of overlapped ditches problem. In fact, it is frequent to record evidences of ditches that were reopened, by the re-excavation of part of its previous fillings. It is important to notice that only when the reopening is partial is it

detectable by archaeology. The total remove of previous filling deposits leaves no evidence, and if they occurred, then these activities would have been even more common.

This creates problems to ditch dating, because there might be a significant time between the initial excavation of a ditch and its last filling sequence. Only with several sections and good dating sequences we can evaluate these problems.

But another problem is why they reopened some ditches? And why frequently just a central part of the ditch, leaving a ditch with “walls of sediment”? Is it because they want to rapidly fill it again with new deposits and materials? They must have done so, otherwise those “walls of sediment” would have been eroded (and we can clearly see them in some sections, like the one presented here).

This kind of stratigraphic sequences points to human intentionality in the formation of the deposits inside ditches, not just because of the materials or the structured organization they might present. The structure of the deposits itself may be an argument to that intentionality.

0105 - Bela Vista 5

Location: Beja municipality, Beja district, Alentejo, South Portugal)
Chronology: Late Chalcolitic /Early Bronze Age

Bibliographic references: unpublished.

The archaeological materials, namely the pottery, already suggested that this enclosure would be a later one in the context of Iberian ditched enclosures (see post 96).

Radiocabon recently confirmed that idea, by putting the ditches in the last three hundred years of the 3^rd millennium BC.

But there are earlier pits and pits later than this time span, so the enclosure was added to an already existing site and pits continued to be built after the ditches were filled.

And not far (less than a kilometre to East and to West), necropolis of hipogea from Late Neolithic and Bronze Age were detected and excavated.