0423 - Back to Santa Vitória enclosure

Entering the inner ditched enclosure of Santa Vitória. Flight done in the end of the last campaign (2018) by Era Arqueologia. 

Next Monday the Era Arqueologia team will be back to the second campaign of the new research project in Santa Vitória (see project goals here), directed by A.C. Valera and A.C. Basílio. The project is developed by Era Aqueologia, with the logistic support of the Municipality of Campo Maior and the institutional collaboration of Direcção Regional de Cultura do Alentejo.

0402 - Santa Vitória: the usual

The work in Santa Vitória has been mainly cleaning. Namely the already excavated ditches, from which there is no new information to collect. 

But in ditch 2 we started to define a new section and the top of preserved fillings, and the expected is there. Like in many other ditches of many other enclosures, Santa Vitória is also presenting recutings filled with layers of stones.

0401 - SANVIT 2018_2021

Visit to Santa Vitória in the context of the international meeting organized by ERA in 2012 (Gulbenkian, Lisbon) on "Ditched enclosures and funerary practices", later published in the British International Reports.

Next Monday the project "Santa Vitória: temporalities, Architectures and Social Practices in a ditched enclosure - SANVIT", developed by Era Arqueologia in collaboration with Campo Maior municipality and DRC of Alentejo, will start, with the first campaign of field work, co-directed by me and Ana Catarina Basílio.

The project is linked to the Perdigões enclosure's one, not just because of the institutions and people involved, but mostly by the scientific inquiry, as can be deduced from the project abstract:

" The project is focused on the ditched enclosure of Santa Vitória (classified as site of public interest, and property of the State) located in the municipality of Campo Maior, Portalegre district. It aims to apply a scientific inquiry that allows the comparing of the social dynamics and the temporalities of a small ditched enclosure with the ones that have been identified in a large complex of enclosures such as Perdigões.
It is intended to produce information that responds to the present problems involving ditched enclosures and that, simultaneously, allow the construction of a comparative frame for different/similar dynamics observed in Perdigões. We want to comprehend how two apparently different biographies can be integrated in a frame of shared principles, but expressed in distinct ways and durability. Therefore, the project will be developed in strict connection with the Perdigões Global Research Project.

The specific main goals are:

- Obtain the global plan of the site through geophysics;

- Built a chronological frame for the site and establish its temporalities;

- Characterize the social practices that took place at the enclosures and its periphery and the processes of filling of negative structures;

- Determinate the levels of interaction, in terms of exogenous materials and mobility of animals and (if possible) humans.

            - Characterize the material culture accessing style and technology;

            - Contextualize the site in the local settlement network;

            - Evaluate the conservation situation of the structures previously excavated and exposed for several decades and define a plan of intervention, aiming the preservation of the site;

            - Develop a program of public display and heritage education associated to the site.

For starting, though, we have a hard task ahead, for the site is covered with bushes. 

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0399 - Santa Vitória. The new project of ERA at a ditched enclosure

It has just been approved a new research project, promoted by the ERA team (in a partnership with the DRC-Alentejo and Municipality of Campo Maior), to approach the ditched enclosure of Santa Vitória, at Campo Maior, Alentejo. This project aims to compare the social dynamics of a smaller enclosure with the ones of a large and complex one as Perdigões. So, the two projects will be in sound articulation.

0351 - Santa Vitória classified

Image taken from here

Having been excavated in the eighties of the twentieth century, only a few days ago the ditched enclosure of Santa Vitória was classified as an archaeological site of public interest (one of the protection ranks of the Portuguese heritage law).

It was the first ditched enclosure to be excavated in Portugal and stayed like that for more than a decade. It also stayed unpublished…

Image taken from here. When the site was visited in the contextof a meeeting organized by ERA in 2012 about Funerary Practices and Ditched Enclosures. We can identify Alex Gibson, Alasdair Whittle, Niels Andersen, Concha Blasco, etc.

But it still has a great potential for the research of the ditched enclosure phenomena and it would be good to go back there with the new views and inquiries that were developed in the last decades with the emergence of ditched enclosures as a structural expression of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities of Alentejo hinterland.

In fact, the site has at least two enclosures, both sinuous. The inside one, the one that has the entire plan defined, is well patterned, with the gate orientated to the Summer solstice.  As far as I know, the ditch was filled with significant accumulations of archaeological materials and faunal remains (maybe humans too), possibly through structured depositions. Lots of materials to be dated and to provide a good chronological sequence. Summing up, un important archive still with important information, that gained more importance when just 3km away the large and complex set of ditched enclosures of Monte da Conteda was discovered a couple years ago (See other posts on both sites in the blog).

Well, at least now the site has legal protection.

0289 - Visiting Santa Vitória

In the context of the congress organized by Era Arqueologia in 2012, held in Gulbenkian, Lisbon, and dedicated to debate the Recent Prehistoric Enclosures and Funerary Practices in Europe, a field trip was organized and Santa Vitória ditched enclosure was visited by the participants.

 
Part of the group. In the picture we can identify Alasdair Whittle, Niels Andersen and Alex Gibson. All with relevant work in European enclosures.
 

Perspective from the tower of observation of Santa Vitoria enclosure. That horizon was hiding a surprise.

At the time we did not suspected of the incredible complex of enclosures that was just behind that horizon line: Monte da Contenda.

Magnetogram of Monte da Contenda, just 3,5 km from Santa Vitória.

A paper about the preliminary data on this important complex of enclosures is in press in the Estudos Arqueológicos de Oeiras journal.

0215 – Contenda and Santa Vitória

The recently discovered ditched enclosure of Monte da Contenda (Valera and Pereiro, 2013) through Google Earth, just 4,5 km from Santa Vitória ditched enclosure, raises some interesting questions, just like other enclosures that have been recently identified closer to each other (I remember the case of Salvada and Monte das Cabeceiras 2).

Monte da Contenda has at least three ditches, probably of patterned sinuous design, just like Santa Vitoria. It is in a slope facing south. And behind that horizon is Santa Vitoria.

Monte da Contenda, facing its southern horizon.

Naturally, the same circumstance can be perceived from Santa Vitória: Monte da Contenda is just behind that northern horizon.

Santa Vitória facing its northern horizon

The proximity between these two ditched enclosures, although with no direct inter visibility, needs to be explained. They seem to be contemporaneous (at least in part).

This is a new problem to deal with in Alentejo: the spatial proximity of so many ditched enclosures that seem to be generally contemporaneous (a problem long addressed in European contexts). If they are not, well, than we have to deal with short leaving sites. Which raises other problems to the traditional discourse (and again, not a problem unknown in Europe).

We are arranging things to do geophysics at Monte da Conteda. We hope to get new data to address these problems in a more solid way.

References:

Valera, A.C. and Pereiro, T. (2013), “Novos recintos de fossos no sul de Portugal: o Google Earth como ferramenta de prospecção sistemática”, Actas dos I Congresso da Associação dos Arqueólogos Portgueses, p.345-350.

0193 – Solstice day

Today is the Summer solstice.

The inner enclosure of Santa Vitória is one of the Portuguese ditched enclosures that had the gate (the only gate) aligned with the sunrise in this day. It must have been a special day there, some 4500 years ago.

0122 - A visit to Santa Vitória

In the context of the International Meeting “Prehistoric enclosures and funerary practices”, the ditched enclosure of Santa Vitória was visited by three dozens of participants. Being aware of the visit, the Delegação Regional de Cultura of Alentejo and the Campo Maior municipality developed efforts to have the site presentable: it was cleaned and the informative placards renewed. A good example of a joined effort of private and public initiatives to display, at an international level, this important ditched enclosure.

It is, though, a pity that, after all this time and in face of the new approaches and critiques, the discourse expressed by the informative placards stays the same. Santa Vitória did not have an internal bank. There is no evidence of it. Not inside the ditches, that have structured deposits of fauna, pottery and stone structures, and not anywhere else. Also the pits of two meters diameter by two metres deep, full of deposits with fauna and archaeological material, hardly can continue to be assumed as huts. This discourse was elaborated almost 30 years ago. Santa Vitória was the first ditched enclosures to be detected and excavated in Portugal, in the context of the “battle” between diffusion and indigenous approaches to walled enclosures. Born in a research context isolated from the European phenomena of ditched enclosures (in its variety) Santa Vitória had to be a fortified settlement.

But today, in face of new theoretical approaches and new empirical evidence, that interpretation no longer stands. And the image of twenty persons from different proveniences inside the inner enclosure is absolutely suggestive of the social role of this small enclosure.

Information should be renewed in the placards, not just the material support of it. And the data that resulted from the excavations, already aged of thirty years, should be published, so interpretations could be argued. Finally, excavations should come back. Archaeological excavations I mean, because the rain waters are excavating bit by bit the unprotected parts of the internal ditched that were not excavated during the eighties of the last century. And not just to save what is being destroyed by nature, but also to provide empirical data obtained with different questions in mind (which imply different methods and new analysis).

 I believe that Santa Vitória could yet be an important site in the Portuguese Recent Prehistory of enclosures, overcoming the status of irrelevance that results from its abandonment by research.

0019 - "Wavy ditches"

The number of known ditched enclosures in South Portugal has been increasing in the last years, being almost thirty now. Between them, several present a peculiar design that has been designated by “sinuous ditches”. This peculiar configuration didn’t raise the necessary attention to its interpretation, as a result of a functional attribution that doesn’t question the ideological foundations of architecture.

In a recent paper (Valera, in print 2010) I presented a first attempt to organize these particular designs in four basic categories according to integral or almost integral plans of ditches:

A. Sequences of regular and aggregated lobes (1. Santa Vitória; 2. Outeiro Alto 2; 3. Xancra); B. Sequences of separated regular lobes (4. Moreiros 2; 5. Águas Frias); C. Regular wavy (6. Juromenha 1; 7. Perdigões); D. Irregular wavy (8. Águas Frias; 9. Perdigões).

This morphological diversity is certainly meaningful and the traditional association to the design of walls with bastions, if arguable for some of these categories (such as the B. or even D.), is clearly unacceptable for the A. and C.. Explanations for the particular designs like the ones in Xancra, Santa Vitória or Outeiro Alto, that so far represent a specificity of the middle Portuguese Guadiana basin, need to be searched elsewhere. In the quoted paper I argued that some answers can be found in the ideological connotation of architecture, namely in its cosmological foundation. Locations, topography, astronomic orientation, landscape connections and design, all talk about architectures that are impregnated by cosmologic senses, without which these sites cannot be comprehended.

Reference:
Valera, António Carlos (in print 2010), “Fossos sinuosos na Pré-História Recente do Sul de Portugal: ensaio de análise crítica”, Actas do V Encontro de Arqueologia do SW Peninsular.

0008 - Santa Vitória ditched enclosure

Image of the inside enclosure of Santa Vitória, published in Valera & Filipe, 2010, courtesy of Miguel Lago.

Location: (Campo Maior municipality, Portalegre district, Alentejo, South Portugal)
Chronology: Chalcolithic
Bibliographic references: Dias, 1996.

Santa Vitória was the first ditched enclosure identified and partially excavated in Portugal, during the eighties of the XX century. Naturally, according to the dominant paradigm of the time, it was seen as a settlement, a small fortified village, with an earth bank associated to a ditch. The strange configuration of the ditch was seen as a previous design of what would became to be known as the bastion walls (I recently developed a critique on the matter, still in print).

Reconstitution of Santa Vitória by Ippar.

No attention was given to the fact that there was no evidence of bank erosion inside the ditches. The fact that there were structures and clear deposition assemblages inside the ditches were not questioned, since the idea of settlement was also not to be question. Like Rabelais couldn’t be an atheist in the XVII century, this kind of sites couldn´t be anything else but fortified domestic settlements.

Well, nowadays “the times, they are changing”. In the context of winder and strong evidence from other Portuguese enclosures and different theoretical approach, Santa Vitoria can be reviewed. If there was an inside bank, as the reconstitution image suggests, where is the bank earth (supposedly geological material)? Not in the ditch, filled by deposits with a great number of archaeological material, stones and structures. If there was a bank, how could some pits be where they are (in the place of the presumed bank)? The design, we know now, is not unique and seems to respond to a pattern observed in other sites that strongly suggest that there is a cosmological foundation to this design (such as Xancra or Outeiro Alto 2), that have little to do with defence strategy. The apparently summer solstice orientation of the door of the inside enclosure is now being explored in the context of the NIA’s project ”Ditched Enclosures Plans and Neolithic Cosmologies: a landscape, archaeoastronomic and geophysical approach”.

Unfortunately, the publication of excavation results is minimum, which makes it harder to go into deeper discussion, namely about the depositions inside the ditches, since there is news of very well preserve contexts.

Santa Vitória, though, still has a lot of informative potential to the actual debate going on in Iberia about the social role of this kind of sites.