0414 - Human bones in ditches

It has just been published a paper about the deposition of human remains in ditches during Recent Prehistory in South Portugal, centered in the case of Perdigões, but integrating it in the Iberian context.
It is a chapter of the book Fragmentation and Depositions in Pre and Proto-Historic Portugal that can be download here: http://www.nia-era.org/publicacoes/cat_view/4-outras-publicacoes

0404 - Tomb 4 of Perdigões ditched enclosures

The results of the recent excavation of tomb 4 of Perdigões ditched enclosures will be presented next November 9th, in the Archaeology of Iberian Southwest meeting in Zafra, Spain.

0396 - Perdigões: back in Easter.

This year, the campaign at Perdigões enclosures will start earlier, just after Easter. From April 2, and during six weeks, you may follow the excavations here. Tomb 4 will be excavated.

0391 - New paper about Perdigões.

A new paper about Perdigões has just been published. It addresses Tomb 2, a tholoi type monument, with construction dated from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, but with a later use in the second half of that same millennium, in beaker times, with some beaker items (like gold foils and ivory button), but with no beakers. Something that is common in Perdigões, as the next paper, coming out tomorrow, discusses.

0388 - Preparing for excavating Tomb 4 at Perdigões

Click on the image to enlarge

To prepare the excavation of Tomb 4 at Perdigões Era team did some more geophysics to improve the available image. Here you may compare the previous image (on the left) of the monument with the new one (on the right, over the previous one). The difference is remarkable and a lot of useful information about the architecture is provided.

We will starting to adopt this procedure to other specific areas of the enclosures to get more detailed information.

0387 - Perdigões Tomb 4

Yesterday the Era team went back to Perdigões to do some more geophysics. This year, another tomb will be excavated in the context of the project on human mobility. This tomb was already identified in the published magnetogram, but now we manage to improve the quality by using another measuring grid.

It is clearer now that it looks like another monument with a circular chamber, small passage, like Tomb 1, also oriented to 90º. It also seems to have some sort of mound still preserved.

This image will be of great help for planning the excavations.

0364 - They keep appearing.

At Perdigões enclosure we are now studying the several funerary structures in the context of the project “Mobility and Interaction in South Portugal RecentPrehistory: the role of aggregation centers”. One of the structures is Pit 40, where cremated human remains were deposited. There are thousands of small fragments of burned bones that are being studied in anthropological terms, and among them fragments of ivory items, also burned, keep appearing.

Several represent parts of anthropomorphic figurines like the ones from the same general context already studied and published (Valera & Evangelista, 2014).

Here is the head of one that lost its face. It presents the hair, the ears and even the final traces of the facial tattoos.

A head like the best preserved one, only smaller.

Number of these figurines is now higher than what it was published and will probably grow as the study of the bone fragments progress. The figurines, like the human bodies, are all in small fragments and burned. Would have this analogy been intentional?

On the contrary, the exception above, when deposited, was intentionally completed in a broken leg with a burned white bone (see publication). Body segmentation and body integrity, parts and wholes. Or windows to the Neolithic mind. Something to be discussed in a coming workshop in Lisbon.

0339 - And another paper on Portuguese Ditched Enclosures

Now about the relations of those sites with funerary contexts at several scales (from cosmology and landscapes to specific funerary structures). It is available in Academia and Research Gate.

0334 - Human remains in ditches at Porto Torrão

The revision that is being done to materials from the excavations of Era Arqueologia in Porto Torrão is providing new information.

As in other ditches of the site, the Chalcolithic ditch 2 has also human remains deposited together with faunal remains and other archaeological materials.

 

 

The deposition of scattered human remains in ditches is a practice that is being more and more frequent in Iberian large enclosures, such as Perdigões, Valencina de la Concepción, Pijotilla and naturally Porto Torrão. Something that is well known in European ditched enclosures, confirming social practices that have a wide distribution, possibly related to shared cosmologies at a large scale.

0324 - Manipulations of human remais at Perdigões: new data

http://perdresearch.blogspot.pt/2016/01/0025-manipulations-of-human-bones-at.html

0315 - Perdigões ditch 7 is dated.

 

Perdigões ditch 7, another one with structured depositions and human remains, is now also dated by three radiocarbon dates that put its filling and re-cuttings between 2600 and 2200 BC. This ditch has one of the most interesting sequences of filling of Perdigões ditches, for it has a sequence of depositions that seem to have been deliberately closed by a stone “cairn”. After that the process of filling changed. That sequence is well dated by these three dates. But some more are needed.

0276 - Published

Contents

The times and timings of enclosures

Alasdair Whittle

Enclosures &burial in Middle &Late Neolithic Britain

Alex Gibson

The place of human remains anf Funerary practices in Recent Neolithic ditched and

walled enclosures in the West of France (IV-III Mill. BC)
Audrey Blanchard, Jean-Noël Guyodo, Ludovic Soler

Funerary practices and body manipulation at Neolithic and Chalcolithic Perdigões ditched

enclosures (South Portugal)
António Carlos Valera, Ana Maria Silva, Claudia Cunha, Lucy Shaw Evangelista

Skeletons in the ditch: funerary activity in ditched enclosures of Porto Torrão (Ferreira do

Alentejo, Beja)
Filipa Rodrigues

Enclosures and funerary practices: about an archaeology in search for the symbolic

dimension of social relations.
Susana Oliveira Jorge

Human Bones from Chalcolithic Walled Enclosures of Portuguese Estremadura:

The Examples of Zambujal and Leceia
Michael Kunst, João Luís Cardoso, Anna Waterman

Human sacrifices with cannibalistic practices in a pit enclosure? The extraordinary early

Neolithic site of Herxheim (Palatinate, Germany)
Andrea Zeeb-Lanz

Gendered burials at an henge-like enclosure near Magdeburg, central Germany: a tale of

revenge and ritual killing?
André Spatzier Marcus Stecher, Kurt W. Alt. François Bertemes

The Copper age ditched settlement at Conelle de Arcevia (Central Italy)

Alberto Cazzella, Giulia Recchia

Funerary practices in the ditched enclosures of Camino de las Yeseras: Ritual, Temporal

and Spatial Diversity
Patrícia Rios, Corina Liesau, Concepción Blasco

Recent Prehistory enclosures & funerary practices

José Enrique Márquez Romero, Vítor Jímenez Jaímez

0274 - Cremation contexts of Perdigões enclosure

Data and problems raised by the contexts with remains of human cremations will be presented next December, 15, in Lisbon (Sociedade de Geografia).

0266 - Coming soon

0250 – Ditched enclosures and funerary contexts

Plan of Torrão ditched enclosure, associated to a cromelec just in the South limit of the ditch and to a megalithic grave in a SW small topographic elevation. (Plan provided by Era Arqueologia S.A.)

This will be the issue of a paper of mine that will be presented at a session in the next UISPP meeting in Burgos. Last week, in the context of my NIA activities, I made a preliminary approach to the subject at the University of Valência. The general idea is to stress that the relations between ditched enclosures and funerary contexts can be perceived in four main dimensions: the sharing of a same cosmological background expressed in their architectures; the way the background is expressed in the combined constructing of meaningful landscapes; the way ditched enclosures and funerary contexts are mutually spatially structured; the way enclosures are assumed as stages for funerary contexts and practices.

In Alentejo’s hinterland we start to have evidence that allow us to address these dimensions and show how deeply ditched enclosures and megalithic and none megalithic funerary and ceremonial contexts are related in the region. They are part of a same Neolithic world understanding that seems to abruptly change by the end of the 3rd millennium BC. 

0204 – Something different (but...)

Today’s post is not about Neolithc or Chalcolithic enclosures, but about another kind of enclosure and from a different chronology. It is about an Iron Age funerary ditched enclosure that is being excavated by Omniknos Company (direction of Tiago do Pereiro) near Beja.

This is a rectangular enclosure defined by a ditch about 1 meter wide, with a central rectangular grave inside. What is interesting is that the ditch shows several recuts. In one of them a human skeleton was recorded. It is possible that there are more, for the majority of the ditch is still to be excavated.

The larger rectangular enclosure with the central grave (the grave in the ditch is being excavated)

In one side, the rectangular ditch is partially overlapped by another ditch that seems to be part of another rectangular enclosure, but not totally finished and with some intervals in the sides, as if the rectangular enclosure was built in an additive way. It also has a central rectangular grave and a human skull just started to appear in the corresponding ditch. It seems that there is a central grave surrounded by graves in the enclosing rectangular ditches.

The other enclosure overlapping the large one.

Some similar contexts from Iron Age were excavated in Alentejo in the recent past: Vinha das Caliças (by Arqueohoje Company) and Poço das Gontinhas (by Era Arqueologia Company).

Of course we are in presence of a different cultural and historical context, but it did remind me of Bela Vista 5, a ditched enclosure from late 3^rd millennium with a grave surrounded by two ditches, being the outside ditch built by segments and showing recuts (although no human remains were found in the small excavated areas).

In fact, these funerary monuments seem to present a sequence of use and construction until they get their final shape. A bit like the Bronze Age cist graveyards that grow from a previous central grave. And the same process of “construction in use” before reaching the final form was also documented for megalithic monuments in Galiza.

We tend to focus in what we see and tend to forget that we see final stages. Things have often quite complex biographies and that later look might result of a process of “construction in use” or “by use”, and not done at once. But they present a pattern. Which means that there are prescriptions and intentions that are followed, resulting in the final significant designs. We see that in several prehistorical ditched enclosures

Although from different times and cultures, there are human behaviors that respond to similar social needs or involve similar social problems. 

0201 – New enclosures under excavation (1)

A new ditched enclosure is being excavated in Alentejo, near Santa Vitória (Beja), by the company Omniknos, directed by Rui Ramos..

At least four sections of ditches will be cut by a water pipeline, possibly corresponding to three different structures. They are being defined and one of them is clearly sinuous, adding another site to the already long list of Portuguese ditched enclosures with sinuous ditches.

By the material associated, they must be from the 3^rd millennium BC, but one of the ditches is cut by a Bronze Age cist. Believing the locals, a necropolis of cists in this area has been destroyed over time by farmers.

To Southeast, maybe 300/400 meters there is a funerary Chalcolithic hypogeum, where three pits are connected by internal passages. Between the hypogeum and the enclosures there are some pits, some of them from Bronze Age.

This is a quite interesting new site.

0195 – Necropolis and ditched enclosures

One of the outstanding monuments of the Alcalar peripheral necropolis.

One of the particularities of large ditched enclosures in south Portugal (and south Spain) is the presence, especially during the chalcolithic, of peripheral necropolis, sometimes organized in clusters, with large funerary monuments, namely tholoi. In Alentejo we have them documented in Perdigões and Porto Torrão, and suspected in Salvada and Monte das Cabeceiras 2. But the most monumental ones are surrounding the ditched enclosure of Alcalar in Algarve. Although they don’t reach the monumentality of some monuments of Andalucia (like the ones of Valencina de la Concepción or Antequera), they are impressive anyway.

The way these monuments were articulated with the ditched enclosures is still not clear. In fact, most of these enclosures are not clear themselves, namely in their plans. At Perdigões, however, we have a little more information about that relation. It seems now that the two tholoi already excavated were initially outside the enclosed area. Latter they were enclosed by the outside ditched, that makes a particular turn to embrace them, and one was reused.

But the specific relations between the dynamics of use of enclosures and the dynamics of use of the surrounding monuments is still badly documented and insufficiently researched. So speculation prevails.   

0169 – Ditches and Funerary Practices

Ditch and entrances to hypogea crypts in the north wall.

At Carrascal 2, near Porto Torrão complex of enclosures, a chalcolithic ditch was partially excavated by ERA Arqueologia S.A. and raveled an uncommon situation.  

The ditch, with 2 meters deep and about 4 meters wide, presented a base sectioned in rectangular shapes with a fireplace and in the north side a sequence of hypogea, at least two of them with access through entrances excavated from the side wall of the ditch.

One of the entrances was close by an agglomeration of stones and another by a schist slab. The first third of the filling of the ditch revealed several layers of pavements of circulation, revealing that the ditch functioned as an access atrium to the hypogea.

Over the last pavement, two depositions of human cremation remains were recorded, demonstrating the importance of this specific funerary practice in the 3^rd millennium C, just like is being corroborated in Perdigões enclosure.

This kind of articulation of ditches and funerary crypts is new in Iberian Chalcolithic, but shows how diversified practices and structures related to death can be in this period, namely in the areas of the large complexes of ditched enclosures.

A preliminary paper on this context (still in press) can be obtained here

Bottom of the ditch and sequence of circulation pavements with the detail of a deposition of a shell at the entrance of the central hypogeum.

0140 – Respecting the dead or embrace them?

At Perdigões set of ditched enclosures there is an area of semicircular shape, in the Eastside, where an assemblage of tombs is located (the two excavated are similar but not exactly tholoi structures). The ditches 1 and 2 are parallel, but in that area the outside one (ditch 1) makes a semicircular curve to enclose the tombs between the two ditches.

For some time, first based in the aerial photograph and later based on the magnetogram, it was though that configuration of space was created to receive the necropolis.

 

   

Well, radiocarbon dating is showing something else. The first uses of the two excavated tombs are dated from the first half of the third millennium BC, while the filling of the outside ditch is from the third quarter of that same millennium, suggesting that when the ditch was open the tombs were already there.

It seems now that the presence of the tombs is responsible for the curve of the ditch. What exactly they intended by that? Respect the previous holy ground? A need of enclosure that specific symbolic area that might still in use?

Well, maybe both, since archaeological contexts and radiocarbon dating also show that one of the tombs was reused precisely during the third quarter of the third millennium.  

But this is just a later episode of the funerary practices that took place at Perdigões.

References:

Valera, A.C., Silva, A.M. & Márquez Romero, J.H., “Temporality at Perdigões enclosures: absolute chronologies of structures and practices”, paper presented at the VI Archaeological Meeting of Southwest Iberia, 2012, in preparation for publication.