0040 - Presentation of Tomb 4 of Perdigões

Excavated during 2018, Tomb 4 of Perdigões is tholos collective tomb dating from the 3rd millennium BC. Is located in the eastern side of the site, just outside the ditched enclosures. The results of the excavation will be presented at the meeting of Archaeology of Southwest Iberia to be held in Zafra (Spain) next November 9th.

The excavations of done in the context of the project PTDC/EPH-ARQ/0798/2014, financed by FCT.

0030 - Perdigões at Wood Conference

In a very profitable collaboration with Hercules Laboratory of Évora University, several archaeometric projects are being developed in order to provide answers to the main problems that are being researched at Perdigões by the Nia team. In the present case we are dealing with the funerary contexts of cremated human remains and trying to know what kind of wood was used for the cremations and what temperature was achieved by analysing the charcoal remains. A poster with the first results will be presented at the meeting “Wood and Charcoal” to be held at Minho University this month.

Here is the title of our collaboration:

Random gathering or intentional wood selection? Charcoal analysis of pit 16 deposit from Perdigões archaeological site

Ginevra Coradeschi, Cristina Dias, Fernando Branco, Laura Sadori and Antonio Valera

0014 – New master thesis on Perdigões

A new master thesis was done in the context of the Global Program of Research of Perdigões. Daniela Pereira presented to the University of Coimbra a thesis in Biological Anthropology in which she studies a part of the cremated human remains recovered in the central area of Perdigões enclosure in the excavation of NIA-ERA Arqueologia.
 

New and important information about the human remains present in this unusual funerary context is now available, adding to the information from other features in the same area and that is in press at the moment.

0010 – The anthropological study of human remains from Perdigões tomb 1.

 

Secundary human depositions in tomb 1 of Perdigões (photo by Miguel Lago)

The Perdigões ditched enclosure has being continuously investigated since 1997 and during the last years, several funerary structures have been unearthed, with traces of a variety of mortuary practices that include inhumations and cremations found in different architectural solutions like tombs, pits or ditches. Among them is Tomb 1, a tholos type structure discovered in the eastern side of this site where a large amount of human remains were recovered.

The anthropological study of these remains is now in course at the department of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra by Lucy Evangelista that is doing a PhD with this material.

The intention with this doctoral thesis is to, through anthropological analysis of the human remains recovered from Tomb I and the identification of the funerary rules and attitudes present, contribute to the better understanding of the attitudes towards death that were taking place at Perdigões. In addition she will pursue to contextualize the information recovered from the laboratorial study within the global information already available, not only for the other funerary structures identified in the site, but also in a wider regional context where other coeval collections have been studied.

0002 – Research in human figurines - 1

The recent excavation of pits with the deposition of human cremated remains provided quite important new information about funerary practices in chalcolithic Perdigões (and in Chalcolithic Iberia). Associated to these depositions (still in excavation) there were several human figurines, well known in South Iberia, but until now absent in Portugal. They are made of ivory and the majority is burned and fragmented, suggesting that they were submitted to fire with the human remains (as well as other materials).

Published in Valera & Evangelista, in press. (Copyright A.C.Valera)

This assemblage of figurines was recently studied and a paper will be published in the Journal of European Archaeology. More than discuss what they might represent, the paper focus on the pattern, realism and postures of the figurines and on their possible social role.

This is the abstract:

“Based on a set of anthropomorphic figurines, this paper suggests that the search for realistic human proportion and canonical posture in the carving of those objects as means of expressing ideology through body postures, in a context of diversified forms of manipulation of the bodies in funerary practices.      

It is argued that, against a background of predominantly schematic art, the more realistic and canonical anthropomorphic representation of the human body is used to communicate, a set of ideological statements in a more controlled and immediate way, possibly of ideological and social nature, in a period of ontological and cosmological transition.”

Reference:

António Carlos Valera and Lucy Shaw Evangelista, “Anthropomorphic figurines at Perdigões enclosure: naturalism, body proportion and canonical posture as forms of ideological language.” in press.