0037 - Salgada enclosures

Ditch and wall from Salgada (after Manuel Calado, http://crookscape.blogspot.com/).

Location: Borba municipality, Évora district, Alentejo, South Portugal)
Chronology: Chalcolithic
Bibliographic references: (Calado &Rocha, 2007)

From Salgada just a few references are available, since the excavations are still to be published. The public notes speak of a site with a ditch, but also with two rows of stone walls. That makes Salgada the second Portuguese site that has ditched and walled enclosures (the other is Monte da Ponte), but information is scarce, so we don’t know if these structures are contemporaneous or just followed in time.

One interesting aspect, though, is the description of the ditch: “a poligonal ditch, with an entrance, facing eastwards, some 5 m large, where, in a late moment, it has been cut a narrow channel, connecting both ends of the ditch. The ditch itself has been cut in independent portions, recalling the british causewayed enclosures, though in this case, those parts are connected in sequence.” (CALADO, M. (2006), “Digging up a monument”, Gema Blog, (http://crookscape.blogspot.com/).

Apart from the eastern orientation of the gate (important in the context of my project on astronomic orientation of enclosures), the “independent cutting” of parts of the ditch seems to support the idea of a modular architecture (see here).

Salagada is, therefore, an important site for several issues regarding enclosures in South Portugal. We will be waiting with expectation for the publication of the results of the excavations.

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.