0425 - Portuguese enclosures in meeting

A meeting to commemorate the classification of Perdigões enclosure as National Monument will be held at Carmo Museum in Lisbon next November 23. Here is the program.

0416 - Talk about the dramatic situation of Portuguese Ditched Enclosures

Next week, in Serpa (Alentejo, South Portugal), I will be speaking about the actual situation of Portuguese Ditched Enclosure in the region, where these sites have their major concentration and reach the higher monumentality in Portugal.
It is an event integrated in the commemoration of the  International day of Monuments and Sites, that, unfortunately, we have to use to show what we don't do and should be doing regarding heritage preservation.
I will be talking about the drama that Prehistoric ditched enclosures are facing. They represented the social trajectory of Neolithic communities until the end of the 3rd millennium BC, when this path collapsed and ditched enclosures with it. They didn't do well with the transition from the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BC.
Well, again, they are not doing well with another millennium transition, now from the 2nd to the 3rd millennium AC. In Alentejo, they were born with agriculture (not out of agriculture, as some argue), and their archaeological remains are now being destroyed by it.
I will try to show their historical, cultural and social value, and show that are several that still can be saved from the cultural, social, environmental and heritage disaster that is happening in Alentejo, sponsored by the Portuguese Government.

0407 - Discussing the end of prehistoric ditched enclosures

Next weekend (16-17 November 2018), in Coimbra, the transition between the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC in Western Iberia will be discussed. This is the moment of the twilight of ditched enclosures in Iberia. The reasons for the collapse of the social trajectory of Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies will debated as well as what followed.

My contribution: Death in the Occident Express: reasons for a social collapse in the end of the 3rd millennium BC in Iberia Southwest.

0405 - New geophysics of Portuguese Ditched Enclosures

Presentation at the X Archaeology of Southwest Iberia meeting, next November 9th in Zafra, Spain.

0404 - Tomb 4 of Perdigões ditched enclosures

The results of the recent excavation of tomb 4 of Perdigões ditched enclosures will be presented next November 9th, in the Archaeology of Iberian Southwest meeting in Zafra, Spain.

0403 - The twilight of Perdigões

In next September 24 and 25 I will be presenting a synthesis of the available data on Perdigões later phases of use. It will be at a workshop promoted in Lisbon by a team from the Kiel university that is interested in the problems related to climate change occurred by the end of the 3^rd millennium BC and their repercussions in the social trajectories of the time. The confluence of interests (the next project that is being designed for Perdigões dedicates particular attention to the social changes in the Late Chalcolithic / Early Bronze Age) has been leading to a collaboration between this university and ERA Arqueologia regarding ditched enclosures (at the moment, we are collaborating in completing the geophysics of Monte da Contenda).

0371 - Workshop on Prehistoric deposition and fragmentation practices

Depositions and fragmentation, as intentional and meaningful social practices, are common in many European prehistoric enclosures. The same happens in Iberian ones, although not always perceived, conceptualized, and questioned as so.

To encourage the debate and research of such subjects in Portuguese archaeology the following workshop was organized and will take place in Lisbon, in 14 October. We have chosen a small auditorium of a public book store to do this. We also want to encourage the public interest.

0360 - Some notes about the meeting Enclosing Worlds

A short overview of the meeting (in Portuguese) here.

0355 - My contribution to Enclosing Worlds meeting

"Enclosing Worlds. Comparative approaches to enclosure phenomena", a international meeting held at Reguengos de Monsaraz (12-14 October 2016) has just finished. My personal evaluation will be published, by invitation of  the editor, in next number of Almadan journal.

Until then, here it is the link to the draft text that I used in my presentation, "Prehistoric enclosures of Southwest Iberia: tangible expressions of Neolithic immateriality":

0354 - Meeting Enclosing Worlds

In 12 days will start the international meeting Enclosing Worlds, that will take place in Reguengos de Monsaraz, Évora, Portugal. The program can be seen here: http://enclosingworlds.blogspot.pt/p/program.html (registration to assist in the same site).

For the first time in Portugal we are putting in confrontation historical trajectories from different continents where enclosure building had relevant social roles. It is an exercise of compared Archaeology to discuss social processes and enlarge horizons in the approach to this complex and fascinating expression of the humane: architecture as space organizer, as expression of cosmologies and as social synthesis.

An organization of Era Arqueologia S.A., ICArEHB centre and Municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz (with the support of Esporão, FCT, DRCALEN, Municipality of Redondo) and with the enthusiasm of Perdigões project.

0348 - Enclosing Worlds Programme

The programme for oral presentations at the meeting Enclosing Worlds (to be held in Reguengos de Monsaraz, Portugal, 12-14 October 2016) is now available here.

Lower registration fees to attend until 31 July (here).

0341 - Brasilian (Proto) Jê enclosures come to Enclosing Worlds

(Image taken from http://jelandscapes.exeter.ac.uk/regions/highlands/campo-belo-do-sul/)

The brasilian Jê enclosures will be present at the meeeting Enclosing Worlds, where the enclosing phenomena will be discussed by confronting different historical situations and trajectories from different parts of the world. You may see the abstracts as they are being progressivelly dislayed at http://enclosingworlds.blogspot.pt/p/abstracts.html.

0331 - Meeting about enclosures and methods

In the sequence of the research developed about the subject in NIA-ERA, I'll be participating in a workshop at Oporto University (next March 17th) dedicated to debate the relations between the research of enclosures and methodological options and approaches. Here is the program (in Portuguese):

Recintos peninsulares da Pré-História Recente. Métodos multidisciplinares de investigação.

0328 - Perdigões in Évora next week

Perdigões: an aggregation centre in Prehistory and in the Present

15.00 – 16.00

Perdigões: a synthesis of 18 years of research of an exceptional site

António Carlos Valera

 Workshop

16.30 – 17.30

The display of Perdigões: limitations and potentials

Miguel Lago

 

The anthropological record of Perdigões: evaluation from the case study of tomb 1

Lucy Shaw Evangelista

The faunal record of Perdigões: data from the study of 15 000 studied bones.

Cláudia Costa

The research of ditched enclosures in Portugal: reasons for the exceptional status of Perdigões.

António Carlos Valera

 Followed by a debate and visit to an exhibition of Perdigões contexts and materials.

0327 - Abstracts for the meeting Enclosing Worlds

 

The preparation of the meeting Enclosing Worlds is going on. Paper proposals are being received and analysed. Abstracts will be progressively displayed in the web page during the next months.
You may check the abstracts here.

0311 - Talk at Seville University

Next thursday, a talk in a Master of University of Seville about "The ditched enclosures phenomena in South Portugal and the Perdigões case study".

0310 - Call for papers

 

Is now open the call for papers for the conference "Enclosing worlds. Comparative approaches to enclosure phenomena" to be held in Portugal in October 2016.

More information here

.

0304 - Enclosing worlds 2016 conference

 

ENCLOSING WORLDS

Comparative approaches to enclosure phenomena

 12 – 14 OCTOBER, 2016, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

 

CONFERENCE PROPOSAL – 1^st announcement

 Analogy was always central to archaeological methods and interpretations. It is a powerful tool that has been consecutively criticized and theorized, remaining at the heart of the archaeological practice. Between the large amplitude of the uses of analogy in Archaeology, the cross-culture comparative methods have been shown to be useful to deal with cultural change and the correlations between materiality, human behavior and social organization.

This conference intends to focus on the emergence and development of the European prehistoric enclosures phenomena in the context of a large scale social practice of enclosing expressed by architectures, landscapes and forms of territorial management. It is meant to confront the diversity of the European phenomena between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age with other historical processes of enclosure building developed in other continents and to discuss the social implications and the social roles of such architectures and strategies of space organization.

With this purpose, the conference will reunite case studies from Western and Eastern Europe, Central and Southern Africa and North and South America, stimulating the development of comparative research on this topic and the debate on comparative methodologies, namely regarding the definition of comparable controlled units.

The organization of the meeting will be the responsibility of a partnership between the research group for the Development of Complex Societies of the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB - University of Algarve), the archaeological research department of ERA Arqueologia (NIA-ERA) and the Global Research Program of Perdigões enclosure.

Call for papers is opened until 31 March 2016.

 

Inscriptions for assistance will be open in October 2015.

Contacts: António Carlos Valera (antoniovalera@era-arqueologia.pt)

 

 

 

0298 - Salvada enclosure

Will be one of the ditched enclosures addressed in my next conference in May 20th at Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa.

0290 – Perdigões interactions

Next week the exogenous materials of Perdigões complex of enclosures and the interaction networks that they traduce will be presented in Madrid. Results of research developed by several researchers from several institutions that collaborate with the Global Program of Archaeological Research of Perdigões coordinated by Era Arqueologia. The presentation will be in the context of the workshop "Key Resources and Socio-cultural Developments in the Iberian Chalcolithic" to be held in the German Archaeological Institute of Madrid and University of Alcalá de Henares.

Research on items made of ivory, cinnabar, limestone and marble, variscite and sea shells or large flint blades, bell beaker and other stiles of pottery will be discussed.