0437 - Fraga da Pena: a cerimonial place.

Fraga da Pena. A small enclosure built against a granitic tor, in order to condition the access to a passage (truly megalithic) to the other side of the fraga, where one reaches an authentic altar over the deep valley and with a wide view over the landscape. And it constitutes a stage for those who are higher up the slope. A scenario that inspires sacredness and is conducive to ceremonial practices, which the archeological contexts involved also suggest.

0422 - A Continental Beaker (influence) in Perdigões?

From the later contexts in the central area of the enclosures, this beaker with a high profile and an unseen decoration (circular jagged impressions, almost as stamps) presents a stylistic proximity to some continental beakers, namely in the shape.

Similar high profiles are not common in Iberia, but some are known, also with unused decorations in the walled enclosure of Fraga da Pena (Beira Alta, Central Portugal) with a similar chronology (end of the 3rd millennium BC).

Mobility comes to mind.

0392 - And more two about Bell Beakers in enclosures

Download Here and Here.

0344 - Beakers and enclosures

In the next 12 and 13 of May, in a Iberian meeting taking place at the Faculdade de Letras of Lisbon University, I will be talking about beakers and their social roles in two different enclosures: Fraga da Pena in Central/North Portugal and Perdigões in the South. A walled enclosure and a ditched one. 

Some International beakers from Perdigões enclosures

Nailed impressed Beakers from Fraga da Pena walled enclosure.

There are many differences between these two contexts and between their “beaker expressions”. But there are also some similarities: the ways the characteristics of both sites are intrinsically related to the social roles that beakers seem to have been performing there. Two good examples of a contextualism sound bite: that objects and contexts are meaningfully bonded.  Discussing beakers as an entity regardless their contextual specificities is a possible approach at a large scale of analysis, but it would hardly enlighten on the diverse ways they were historically active and regionalized.

0337 - Enclosures, Identity and heritage: The Fraga da Pena case.

Fraga da Pena (Fornos de Algodres, Guarda) was discovered for Archaeology by me (and two “Isabels”) in 1991. Between that year and 1998 I excavated the site and produced a scientific discourse about it (part of my PhD thesis). It is now an important context in Portuguese archaeology regarding the bell beaker phenomena and the late 3^rd millennium BC, as well as for the debate regarding enclosures in Iberia.

That work gave way to a project of public display that tried to bring the site back to a socially active role (see here what was done). Today, it is used as the main banner of the Municipality page on Facebook (where we can read “A history that touch us”) and its profile is in the logo (left side) of the municipality (curiously with the representation of the sun, something that might have been important in the site’s role in Prehistory (see here).

I am happy. The Fraga is back as a meaningful place and not just for archaeologists. Job done. My thanks to all that have contributed to this, and they were many: from Portugal (obviously the majority), Spain, Czeck Republic, Hungary, Turkey, France, Belgium, USA, Norway, Wales, Poland…

0288 - Visiting Fraga da Pena

A group of german archaeologists and students of Archaeology (headed by Michael Kunst and guided by me) visiting the Fraga da Pena walled enclosure in 2008.

Some took some risks to photograph a painting preserved in one of the rocks of the granitic tor.

0186 – Fraga da Pena in the museum

These are the posters referring Fraga da Pena presented at the small museum of archaeology in Fornos de Algodres, the municipality of the site.

There, some archaeological materials from this walled enclosure are shown and the architecture of the site is explained.

0173 – Why are they where they are?

The huge tor of Fraga da Pena used to built a double enclosure in the late third millennium BC. Here seen from the valley.

The approach to Architecture that interests me is based on an anthropological perspective of space, where, in human construction, natural and artificial are cast, as also proposed by ecological approaches. Thinking architectures is thinking their contexts, the global social environment from which they emerge and simultaneously help to fabricate: sets of actions, meanings and materiality through which the human dwelling of time and space occurs. It reflects experiences and perceptions of space; it is relative to technological stages and options; satisfies specific practical needs while expresses and acts over ascetics, ideologies and current social relations; functions as a communication device of explicit and implicit meanings.

It does so through the physical structures but also through the ways space is organized and through associated activities. Corresponds to the construction of active scenarios, conditioned (because they transport tradition and respond to social needs) and conditioning (because they actively interfere in social relations, enabling and conforming them), in the context of human agency in a given time and space.

            Architecture inevitably involves a space organization through the imposing of meanings and by doing so goes further than the simple notions of occupation and construction. Furthermore, it deals in a meaningful way with forms but also with the emptiness, with the positive and with the negative, with the added features but also with the previous categorized “natural” elements of a given space.

In this sense, as a process of building and organizing meaningful spaces, Architecture is not linked, in a restrictive way, to the human material construction. In an Anthropological perspective there is no undifferentiated space in human dwelling. Space is always categorized, classified, and only the ways of doing so are contingent. Before interfere through construction, man architects the space using its elements, the experiences and perceptions that they provide and the associated meanings. When building Man tends to use these previous features with their symbolic meanings and associated experiences, incorporating them as architectonic elements in the space organization.

There is no architecture made over an empty and insignificant neutral space. To understand a “building” implies to understand the previous meaningful place where it was built.  Being that a granitic tor (as Fraga da Pena), a natural amphitheatre (as Perdigões) or the particular place where stands the modern Centro Cultural de Belém (in Lisbon). 

0168 – About tors used to built enclosures

Fraga da Pena (Fornos de Algodres) walled enclosure.

In an Anthropological perspective there is no undifferentiated space in human dwelling. Space is always categorized, classified, and only the ways of doing so are contingent.

Before interfere through construction, man architects the space using its elements, the experiences and perceptions that they provide and the associated meanings.

Frequently, Architecture is a simple recognition and categorization of previous natural forms that are connected to stories, myths, and transformed in active storage of memories and experiences.

In this context, the tors volume and shape might be associated to sculptures or architectures of ancient times, mythic times, ancestral or divine. We can hardly assume that, in Prehistory, these elements were taken as “natural elements”, explained by tectonic and differential erosion.  

On the contrary. They probably had associated legends that contributed to the entity of the place, making it a meaningful mark in the landscape, through which space was organized and experienced.

The building of this kind of enclosures is not just a matter of building walls using a favorable previous situation. Walls and tor are integrated in a building where the previous meaning of the natural feature, not conceived as so, certainly had a main symbolic role. The choosing of the place and the decision of building an enclosure there hardly can be understood if we do not consider the meaning and symbolic power of these (for us) natural formations. Even if we cannot precise the specificities of that meaning and power, not consider them will result in a poor interpretation and explanation, that will reflect us more than them.  

0161 – Fraga with snow

Today it will snow in Beira Alta above 400m of altitude. Fraga da Pena, located at 750m, will be like this.

4000 years ago it would have been the same. But inside no hut evidences were recorded; nothing that suggested that people were living there. On the contrary, the materials present (and the ones that were missing) suggested a ceremonial place. The ambiance of the granitic tor, the painting on it, the open passage through it and the natural amphitheatre in the slope making the enclosure look like a stage, all reinforce this image. And so does the snow.

0158 – Creating a legend to communicate heritage

Here is the publication of a legend, a recent one, about an archaeological site: the walled enclosure of Fraga da Pena. The idea was explained here, in a previous post 1,5 years ago. 

0088 - Fraga da Pena and beakers

Fraga da Pena is the site where the largest number of beaker pots was recorded in central-north Portugal. But the most interesting thing is the distribution of beaker shards inside the two walled enclosures: concentration of shards from several half pots in the middle of the outside enclosure; the distribution of beaker shards along the path that leads to the inside enclosure and a deposition of a complete exemplar of the few International style beakers at the end of a stone alignment in the sequence of the gate.

The general appearance of Fraga da Pena, without evidences of inside domestic structures or contexts, already suggested a particular symbolic social role for the site and for the activities that were developed there. But the spatial distribution of the beaker remains inside reinforces that discourse.

Here we have large walls (more that 3 meters wide) that enclose very small areas where no domestic remains were detected. On the contrary, exceptional material is present and dominates the archaeological assemblages. The monumental natural tor and the relations to local landscape complete the image of a special place for special practices. Beaker pottery seems to have played also an important role in those practices.

(Image taken from Valera, 2007)

0074 – What’s inside?

Possible reconstitution of the wall of the inside enclosure of Castro de Santiago and of one of the inside huts.

Usually, inside ditched enclosure we only have negative structures, basically constituted by pits. Positive structures are rare or simply nonexistent.

On the contrary, pits are rare in walled enclosures (see here), but positive structures are common (whit some exceptions, such Fraga da Pena). But it is current to find walls or alignments of stones that are usually interpreted as hut infrastructures or stone pavements.

At Castro de Santiago (Beira Alta), inside the inner enclosure, two of those huts were identified where the bedrock makes a sort of basin, and they had central fireplaces built in a hemi hexagonal plan with three slabs.


Hut infrastructures at Castro de Santiago and actual parallel in Africa.



Hut infrastructures at Castro de Santiago.

Although the walled architecture and the use of rock tor formations is similar in Fraga da Pena (just 8 km north in the same valley), the excavations made there didn’t reveal any similar structures inside. Being alike, those two walled enclosures seem to have played different functional roles, although, in terms of social identity management, they might have had similar tasks (as I have argued elsewhere: Valera, 2007).

It is important to notice what’s inside an enclosure and what’s missing to start to give them names. Structures, material cultural, social practices evidences, etc. He must “built” contexts first. So, when we have a surface evidence of a stone wall or a geophysical image of ditches, we must be careful in interpretation. If the general plan of the architecture of an enclosure could give us enough information to develop some analysis and propose some interpretation and develop some ideas, the cases of Castro de Santiago and Fraga da Pena remember us that similar general architectures could enclosure quite different contexts.

0051 - Fraga da Pena’s job

As I have put it several times, heritage only exists when is socially activated and lived. Archaeology, like other sciences in general, has its social justification in the social recurrence that provides.

Prehistoric enclosures have a double emblematic role in this issue. In one hand they are a kind of heritage that needs to be known, comprehended and valued by people, as a main archaeological phenomenology to understand prehistoric communities of Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Second, as so many of them did in the past, they can be used to bring people together, generating aggregation, reinforcing identities and a general common sense of heritage preservation and recognition of its social values and roles.

This happed last Saturday at the walled enclosure of Fraga da Pena (Fornos de Algodres) for the 3rd time in six years.



As the scientific research saw it, this huge and magnificent granitic tor must have had stories, myths, associated to its existent and majestic domain over the local landscape. When the two walled enclosure were built, some 4200 years ago, this was already a “place”: a local with a name and a history (not a modern geological one, but a mythological one), part of the local landscape semantics.

How to pass this view of a group of rocks and stone walls to common rural local people and general public?



In the absence of a real one, a legend was created and published in 2005, using other local myths and the scientific discourse displayed about the site. The legend, in a more pleasant way, makes people understand that this was a special place for special social practices and important for past world views.



In that year the legend was theatrically played at Fraga da Pena, for local community. Last Saturday another show based on it was performed there, bringing more than 300 persons to the place and, in a way, restoring its earliest social function: aggregating people in social practices that reinforce identities and a sense of territoriality, developing a consciousness of common memories and senses of belonging and, in summary, making heritage doing its job.

0004 - Fraga da Pena walled enclosures

Location: (Fornos de Algodres municipality, Guarda district, Beira Alta, Central Portugal)
Chronology: Late Chalcolithic / Early Bronze Age
Bibliographic references: Valera, 1997; 2000; 2007.

The sites corresponds to a spectacular granitic tor that rises, rather strikingly and to a considerable height (750 m of altitude), near the summit of the right slope of Muxagata stream (a tributary of Mondego River). It has a magnificent view over the valley and it is a remarkable land mark.
Two small enclosures were built attached to the tor, using stone walls of 3 meters wide. Traces of human occupation were detected outside, in the top of the slope.
The site has been systematically excavated, revealing the absence of domestic occupation inside. On the contrary, the exceptional assemblage of finds (bell beakers, anthropomorphic figurine, personal ornaments, rock painting), and the rarity of other daily artefacts (such as lithic material or loom weights), suggest that the site had no residential function. Its topography, lower than the top of the slope, clearly make it defensively inefficient. In fact, it looks more like a stage.



Due to its location, Fraga da Pena would have played a significant role in the organization of local landscape over several successive historical periods (as it still does). Its occupation reflects a strategy that sought to exploit both the symbolic and communication potential of the tor. But the wall enclosures shouldn’t be regarded simply as an appending of a structure to a natural rock, but rather as a unified building, where both artificial and natural features were combined and interdependent in generating a place that serve as a stage for certain specific social practices.
Those social practices might be related to a narrow passage in the middle of the tor, connecting the interior of the first enclosure with the other side of the tor, to a natural balcony over a steep scarp. This passage is naturally (?) aligned with East – West axis, so when the sun rises behind the other slope of the valley, light comes through the passages, hitting part of the first enclosure that is in the tor’s shadow. A clear expression of a traditional Neolithic ideological use of landscape and natural elements.



It is a magnificent exemplar of the architecture of the period, combining in meaningful building natural and artificial elements, used to communicate and organize the landscape in the context of social identity fabrics.
Is part of a local archaeological route and its archaeological materials are exhibit in a local museum.