0003 - Research in human figurines - 2

Published in Valera, 2012 (Copyright A.C. Valera)

This is an assemblage of the so called “almeriense idols”. This kind of figurines was assumed to be Chalcolithic, but it didn’t have clear and well preserved contexts or good radiocarbon dating.

In Perdigões, this assemblage appeared in unquestionable Late Neolithic contexts: the five from the left in the bottom of ditch 12 and the one from the right in the low levels of the “hypogeum 1” structure. These contexts are characterized by Late Neolithic pottery an in ditch 12 these anthropomorphic figurines were deposited just a few centimetres from a bone that was dated between 3360-3090 cal BC (2 σ).

Although it is possible to assume that these kind of figurines were used during Chalcolithic times (first half of the 3^rd millennium BC), these contexts clearly show that they emerged in a Neolithic moment and that they are part of a Neolithic ideology that, as I have been stressing, goes into the 3^rd millennium BC. What we use to call Chalcolithic is not a rupture with the Neolithic. It is, in fact, the final expression of its world view. And the development of Perdigões shows this in several ways.

This assemblage was published in Valera, 2012 (see the bibliography page for a complete reference and download link)