Sunday, February 23, 2020

0426 - Comparative Archaeology


I thank to Gábor Szilagyi for bring to my attention these fantastic African sinuous enclosures, that present some similarities with the Prehistoric ones of the Guadiana basin. It is possible that there is here food for a project in comparative Archaeology.


The African ones.


Some of the Portuguese ones.

Saturday, February 22, 2020

0425 - "Tombs" for pots.

In the centre of Perdigões ditched enclosure there are contexts of depositions of human cremated remains dated from the middle of the 3rd millennium with no parallel in Iberia. Those remains were transported in large pots and deposited in pits. Some of the pots were broken in situ inside the pits with the humans remains. For others, small pits were opened for receiving the broken shards of these pots. That is the case of Pit 91, that received part of a big pot and a pile of shards of another bigger one. The shards were deposited in a pile and slide down, as their removing sequence shows. In the involving sediments some few human burned bones and a burned arrow head were collected (they were probably attached to the pot's walls).
This is not a funerary pit, but a pit related to the ritual (involving the braking of the transportation pots) performed in that area regarding the human cremated remains.

The big pot:


Removing the shards in their stratigraphic sequence:



Wednesday, February 19, 2020

0424 - "Sun eyes"

This is one more schematic anthropomorphic figurine from the context of depositions of human cremated remains in the central area of Perdigões ditched enclosures. This one, from 2019 campaign of excavations, just missed the  exhibition of Iberian Prehistoric Idols that recently opened in Alicante, where some of its companions from the same context are present.


Friday, February 7, 2020

0423 - Experimental archaeology at Perdigões


Last campaign at Perdigões we initiated a project to value the effort involved in the digging of ditches at the site. The goal is to estimate, in more solid grounds, the amount of work involved in opening ditches, namely the relation between time / number of workers / excavated volume. We aim to have a better understanding of the social, logistic and economic impact of the big public enterprises that took place at Perdigões.
For this, the Era project had the collaboration of Pedro Cura, who built the tools according to what we know about the tools used in Prehistoric mining, and excavate a part of the geologic in Perdigões, controlling time, volume and the use of different tools. We also aim to see the effect of the work in the tools, aiming to contribute to the identification of archaeological artifacts that might have been used in these tasks.
This was just a first approach that we want to develop in the context of the Perdigões Research Project developed by Era Arqueologia.