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.