Megalithic Tombs in Western Iberia: Excavations at the Anta da Lajinha

1

Introduction

Chris Scarre

Visitors to the hilltop town of Pavia in southern Portugal are greeted by a curious sight. At one end of the main street, an open square fronts the Igreja Matriz, the principal church; but at the other end another square, with cafes and a small museum, is dominated by a very different religious structure, the anta-capela (‘dolmen-chapel’) of Saõ Dinis or São Dionísio (Figure 1.1). On its eastern side, a rather severe gabled porch with simple round-headed doorway gives access up a couple of steps to the interior of the chapel. Against the back wall, directly opposite, the visitor sees an altar faced with typical blue and white glazed tiles, probably 18th century in date, supporting a statue of the saint himself. The walls of the chapel, however, are not built of conventional masonry but consist of seven massive granite slabs, set upright to support the single stone forming the roof. For this is not an ordinary 17th or 18th-century chapel, but a megalithic tomb transformed into a chapel and taken over for Christian worship.

São Dinis at Pavia is the most striking but by no means the only monument of its kind in western Iberia; some 40 antas-capelas are recorded in Portugal, with further examples in neighbouring regions of Spain (Oliveira et al. 1997). Vergílio Correia gave details of six chambered tombs in and around Pavia, including a smaller tomb, long destroyed, close to the anta-capela (Correia 1921, 26–33). Of these six tombs, only one was converted to Christian usage, chosen no doubt because of its size and its position at the southern edge of the expanding township. Particularly striking in its modern setting, the anta-capela of Pavia and its smaller neighbours serve to indicate the scale and density of Neolithic chambered tombs in this region of western Iberia. The Alto Alentejo is, indeed, one of the areas with the highest numbers of megalithic tombs in western Europe.

The anta-capela of Pavia is typical of these Alentejan tombs in several respects. It is only the chamber of a more complex structure that would originally have included a passage and a covering mound. The chamber is formed of seven granite orthostats, relatively narrow and tall, each sloping slightly inwards and leaning against its neighbour. They support a single capstone. Vergílio Correia recorded over 70 megalithic tombs in the Pavia area and excavated no fewer than 48 of them in three field campaigns in 1914, 1915 and 1918 (Correia 1921; Rocha 1999, 2015a). The excavations were typical for their time, but enabled Correia to draw a number of conclusions, not least concerning the standardised design of the chambers:

Los dólmenes de esta región obedecen a un plan uniforme, constando todos de una cámara más o menos circular, a la cual se entra por una galería o corredor desigualmente extenso. Esta cámara, formada por paralelepípedos irregulares, generalmente en número de siete, que son clavados en el suelo con una cierta inclinación hacia el interior, está cubierta por una piedra mayor, en casi todos los casos circular. Encuéntranse, por excepción, dólmenes cuya sala está formada por piedras en mayor o menor número que los apuntados; pero el número normal, por bien decir ritual, en todas las antas portuguesas es de siete sostenes. (Correia 1921, 66)

[The dolmens of this region follow a uniform plan, all consisting of a more or less circular chamber, which is entered by a gallery or passage of varying length. This chamber is formed of irregular parallel-sided blocks, generally to the number of seven, which are fixed in the ground with a distinct inclination towards the interior, and is covered by a large stone that in almost all cases is circular in shape. Dolmens are found, exceptionally, with a chamber formed of a greater or lesser number of stones than this; but the normal, so to say ritual, number in all Portuguese antas is seven supports. (CS trans.)]

Figure 1.1. The anta-capela of Saõ Dinis at Pavia, Alto Alentejo, a large megalithic chamber converted into a Christian chapel probably at the beginning of the 17th century (Oliveira et al. 1997; Rocha 2015). The interior was excavated in 1914 by Vergílio Correia, who found it had been heavily disturbed although some of the original burial assemblage survived (Correia 1921, 26–31). There is no trace of a mound or cairn today, although excavations in 2013 directly in front of the present entrance uncovered the sockets for two, or possibly three, orthostats from the southern side of the passage (Rocha 2015). (Photo: Chris Scarre)

Correia’s fieldwork, though focused on the Pavia area, was not without wider impact on the study of west European megalithic tombs. Glyn Daniel, tracing the origin and development of the passage tombs at a broader geographical scale, drew upon it as a convenient label for all those examples that have a clearly differentiated passage and chamber: ‘The term Pavian Passage Grave is suggested to distinguish the typical Passage Grave from the others, a name taken from the fine concentrations of tombs of this type at Pavia in Portugal’ (Daniel 1941, 3). Using this definition, passage graves in Ireland and northern Europe became variants of the Pavian type. The inwardly-leaning, overlapping orthostats that are so characteristic of many of the Portuguese tombs did not feature in this overarching definition; nor the fact that all 11 of the tombs whose plans Daniel includes have the seven-stone polygonal chamber so typical of the Alto Alentejo (Figure 1.2). This particular configuration is, indeed, restricted to western and northern Iberia.

The anta-capela of Pavia has introduced a number of themes that are relevant not only to the Alto Alentejo region but much more widely across western Iberia. Megalithic chambered tombs – commonly known as antas in Portuguese – are present in large numbers in several other regions, notably in Spanish Extremadura to the east, and in the Spanish province of Galicia in the north-west. Important series of tombs are also known in Portuguese Estremadura, north of Lisbon. Throughout these regions the megalithic chamber consisting of inclined overlapping orthostats supporting a single capstone is the classic (though not the only) type. It is difficult to give an estimate for the total number of surviving tombs, still less for those that once existed, but the number must run into thousands or tens of thousands. Settlement evidence, by contrast, is much more poorly represented, despite targeted field surveys that have been undertaken in several areas in recent decades.

Figure 1.2. Plans of ‘Lusitanian Passage Graves of the Pavian type’. Reproduced by kind permission of The Prehistoric Society from Glyn Daniel, ‘The dual nature of the megalithic colonisation of prehistoric Europe’. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 7 (1941)

That is true for areas immediately north of the River Tagus, which are in many respects an extension of the Alentejan zone. The river, marking the boundary between Alto Alentejo and Beira Baixa, is indeed an arbitrary division. Particularly high densities of tombs are found north of the river in the district of Castelo Branco, and include monuments built of schist and others built of granite blocks. For the latter, as Philine Kalb remarked, ‘os monumentos megalíticos de Castelo Branco pertencem à zona megalítica alentejana, separados desta apenas pelo rio Tejo’ [the megalithic monuments of Castelo Branco belong to the Alentejo megalithic zone, separated only by the Tagus River] (Kalb 1987, 96). This observation has a particular salience in the current volume since it was north of the river at the Anta da Lajinha, on the western edge of the Castelo Branco megalithic cluster, that the fieldwork was conducted that is reported in Chapter 2.

The regional clusters of megalithic tombs form a series of megalithic landscapes, in which tombs are the most conspicuous surviving element. The high densities pose a number of questions about the nature of the Neolithic societies who constructed them and the circumstances in which they came to be built. At the most general level, they form part of the broader family of Neolithic chambered tombs and related monuments that extends from Poland in the north-east to the Straits of Gibraltar in the south, and beyond that into North Africa. That said, regional identities and regional traditions are paramount in understanding the relationship of megalithic tombs to the individual communities who built and used them. Furthermore, tombs are grouped morphologically and chronologically and offer characteristic regional types that imply a strong regional component to their design and meaning, and to the funerary and other practices that were performed there. The concept of the chambered tomb and the valency of megalithic slabs may have been widely shared between different regions of Atlantic Europe. Other features, such as the common provision of a passage, designed perhaps to permit repeated or permanent access, and the practice of above-ground burial within these chambers, also denotes shared beliefs and customs. Once one moves beyond that very general level of analysis, however, regional differences become as salient as the interregional similarities. The typical seven-stone chamber is not a recurrent feature of any region of Europe outside northern and western Iberia. Nor are characteristic associated artefacts such as the engraved stone plaques and crooks (báculos) found beyond Portugal and south-west Spain (albeit the latter resemble motifs found in megalithic art, both in western Iberia and in north-west France: Calado 2002; Cassen 2012). This makes the interpretation and understanding of the patterning at both regional and interregional scales particularly challenging.

Chambered tombs are not the only phenomenon that implies Neolithic movement along the western seaways. There is increasing evidence for the transport of raw materials such as variscite, jadeitite and eclogite (Herbaut and Querré 2004; Querré et al. 2014; Odriozola et al. 2016; Pétrequin et al. 2012b, 2017). Furthermore, the Atlantic distribution of megalithic monuments overlaps (both in time and space) with the distribution of another significant phenomenon: rock art. The recognition of postglacial rock art as an Atlantic European phenomenon arose from the discovery of parallels between rock and megalithic art in Ireland, and their resemblance to motifs from Galicia. The abbé Breuil noted the connection in his presidential address to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1934, and he returned to the theme a quarter of a century later when he drew the megalithic art of Brittany into the same framework (Breuil 1934; Breuil and Boyle 1959). The parallels were studied in detail by Eoin MacWhite, who was sent by Gordon Childe to work with Iberian colleagues in Madrid (Díaz-Andreu 1997, 23; Bradley 1997, 37). MacWhite distinguished in the Irish context between ‘Galician’ art (i.e. rock art in which cup-and-ring motifs form a major component) and Irish passage grave art. The ‘Galician’ tradition was ‘derived, ultimately perhaps from the East Mediterranean, but immediately from the north-western part of the Iberian Peninsula, where it appears to be mixed with epi-Palaeolithic survivals’; whereas passage grave art ‘came from the Southwest of the Iberian peninsula’ although it too ‘has its roots in the East Mediterranean’ (MacWhite 1946, 75). As Bradley has noted, the motifs of Irish megalithic art are entirely different from those of Britain and Brittany. There are considerable differences between Galician and Irish rock art, with most Irish motifs also found in Galicia, whereas Galician art contains animal and other motifs not found elsewhere. Nevertheless, Bradley observes that even though the motifs are not identical between the two regions, broad similarities in the integration of elements support the sense of an underlying Atlantic rock art (Bradley 1997, 41). The pattern, and the problem, is in many respects similar to that for the megalithic tombs: a general interregional distribution within which regional variability is particularly striking.

Rock art in western Iberia overlaps in distribution with major clusters of megalithic tombs, and some have drawn a direct connection between the two in terms of the structuring of the landscape (Fairén-Jiménez 2015). That is true, for example, in the Tagus Valley, where the principal areas of rock art are contiguous to regions north and south of the river that have an unusual abundance of megalithic tombs. It has been suggested that at least some of the Tagus rock art may have been created by the builders of the tombs, although there are issues of chronological resolution to be considered (Serrão et al. 1972a; Oliveira 2008a, 2008b). The relationship is explored in Chapter 5. Another line of analysis points to close links between rock art and Iberian megalithic art, arguing that they are overlapping elements of a single symbolic system (Bueno Ramírez and Balbín Behrmann 2002; Bueno Ramírez et al. 2014). In Galicia, a specific spatial relationship between megalithic tombs and cup-marks has been observed (Criado Boado and Villoch Vázquez 2000, 201). More generally, parallels have been drawn both with the Atlantic rock art of Galicia and northern Portugal (sometimes called ‘Galician-Atlantic’) and with the more widely distributed Schematic Art. Galician Atlantic rock art is exclusively carved, whereas Schematic Art includes both carved and painted motifs. There are changes through time in both the motifs and the location of the art: Galician Atlantic rock art consists of geometric motifs, whereas in later periods weapons and humans and animals (notably stags) are represented. Schematic Art too extends beyond the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, and whereas Galician Atlantic rock art is generally in more open and accessible locations, Schematic Art is also found in rock shelters and caves (Fairén-Jiménez 2015). The long development of the Tagus Valley rock art includes a phase with Schematic Art motifs that may be contemporary with the megalithic tombs (Gomes 2007; Baptista 2009; Garcês 2018; see also Chapter 5 below). Its location, among the litter of angular, irregular schist blocks that fringe the river either side of the Portas do Rodão, presents the difficulty of access typical of Schematic Art (Figure 1.3).

The rock art traditions of Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iberia are just one part of a wider range of symbolic material culture that includes iconic and aniconic artefacts of stone, bone and ivory, and occasionally gold. This sets southern Iberia apart within Western Europe as a whole (Scarre 2017). The most abundant category is the engraved stone plaques of south-west Spain and southern Portugal (mainly of slate, although often referred to as schist); a recent estimate suggests that as many as 4000 of these may survive in museum or private collections (Lillios 2008, 17). Most of them come from chambered tombs, either of megalithic construction, or of the later ‘tholos’ or rock-cut varieties.

There is clearly a risk here of conflating time. The chronologies of Galician Atlantic rock art, Schematic Art, and megalithic tombs may overlap, but the geographical distribution we see today is a palimpsest of individual actions spread out across several generations. It poses key questions about duration and memory. Tombs once built, rocks once carved, endure for long periods. Many tombs had been subject to re-use in the Beaker period or the Bronze Age, testifying to their continuing visibility and significance. Some had been remodelled and their inner surfaces repainted or recarved. Yet as far as the tombs are concerned the construction period itself may have been relatively short.

Although precise chronologies are difficult to achieve, iconographic complexity appears to be a feature of the later Neolithic and Chalcolithic in southern Iberia, and where decorated stone plaques or limestone ‘idols’ are found in classic Portuguese antas, in the majority of cases they testify to re-use during the late 4th or 3rd millennium BC. The tombs themselves could be considerably earlier in date. Many of the available radiocarbon dates on human remains from the tombs fall in the late 4th millennium BC, but some may have been built during the first half of the 4th millennium, perhaps even beginning in the late 5th millennium BC, although the issue is still contested (see e.g. Boaventura 2011; Mataloto et al. 2017; discussed further in Chapter 6 below). The chronological uncertainty derives from the relatively small number of radiocarbon dates that are currently available, and the insecure relationship of many of the samples dated to the constructional episodes. This is compounded by the geology. The great majority of the west Iberian tombs are located in areas of acid soils and granite or schist geology. Hence the large numbers of tombs are not matched by extensive assemblages of human remains. There are exceptions, most notably in the limestone area of Portuguese Estremadura, immediately to the north of Lisbon. Here there is widespread preservation of human skeletal remains in both chambered tombs and burial caves. It is much rarer for human remains to have survived at tombs further east in the Alto Alentejo (though there are significant exceptions, such as Antas 1 and 2 da Herdade de Santa Margarida: Gonçalves 2001, 2003; and Anta de Sobreira 1: Boaventura et al. 2013). Very little human skeletal material, by contrast, survives from the extensive megalithic tomb complexes of northern Portugal or Galicia.

Figure 1.3. Cachão de São Simão, one of the largest sites of the Tagus Valley Rock Art Complex, a cluster of irregular outcrops, some with engraved motifs, on the floor of the steep-sided valley. (Photo: Chris Scarre)

Geology and geography form the essential background to the distribution of Neolithic chambered tombs in western Iberia and the cultural activities and social practices of the communities by whom they were built. Rivers and mountains structure the landscape. To the east, the boundary can be taken as the edge of the Meseta, the upland plateau that constitutes the greater part of central Spain. Its dorsal spine, the Sistema Central, rises to heights of over 2500 m and continues westwards into Portugal, where it ends in the mountains of the Serra da Estrela. The Meseta is drained by a series of rivers that flow westwards through Portugal to the Atlantic coast. The largest of these is the Tagus (Rio Tejo in Portuguese, Río Tajo in Spanish), which rises in the mountains of eastern Spain and crosses Spain and Portugal to reach the sea near Lisbon. At over 1000 km, it is the longest river of Iberia. At the point where it passes from Spain to Portugal the frontier kinks sharply east-west and for a distance of 50 km the river itself forms the boundary between the two countries (the so-called ‘International Tagus’). Immediately to the south are the landscapes of the Alentejo (literally ‘beyond the Tagus’, from the Christian perspective as the reconquest of Muslim Iberia progressed steadily southwards) and Spanish Extremadura. In its lower reaches, the Tagus Valley emerges from the Hercynian massif and enters a wide Tertiary lowland basin flanked on the north-west by Portuguese Estremadura.

North of the Tagus, Portugal is divided into a series of blocks by rivers flowing in a broadly westerly direction from the Meseta to the sea. The most important of these rivers are (from south to north) the Mondego, the Douro, and the Minho, the last of these in its lower course forming the modern frontier between Portugal and Galicia. Each flows through hilly terrain, with only the Mondego valley opening into a coastal plain in its lower reaches, and the majority of the surviving megalithic monuments are found inland. An important cluster of megalithic tombs is found around Viseu in the valley of the Rio Dão, a tributary of the Mondego, and there are large numbers of tombs (including many unexcavated burial mounds) in the mountainous landscapes north of the Douro, continuing beyond the Spanish frontier into Galicia. The Spanish province of Galicia is characterised by a mountainous landscape punctuated around the coast by a series of drowned valleys or rias creating long, narrow marine inlets, the consequence of postglacial sea-level rise. Galicia is also the wettest region of Iberia (indeed one of the wettest in western Europe) with an annual rainfall in excess of 1000 mm. This contrasts with southern Alentejo, one of the hottest areas, with summer temperatures frequently reaching 40°C. Indeed, although fronting the Atlantic, much of inland Portugal has a Mediterranean climate with hot dry summers and cool wet winters. Summer wildfires are a continual threat, and the area is subject to recurrent droughts.

The diversity of the landscape is reflected in its modern agricultural exploitation, although this is not a reliable guide to its agricultural potential for Neolithic subsistence farmers. Pastoralism may have been an important component, and seasonal movement of livestock between uplands and lowlands was a feature of pre-modern economies. The idea that such patterns of seasonal movement can be projected back into the prehistoric past was challenged some decades ago, although recent GIS analyses do suggest that the locations and distribution of megalithic tombs in Iberia are sometimes correlated with least-cost pathways through mountainous terrain (Chapman 1979; Walker 1983; Murrieta Flores 2012; the ‘pastoralist’ hypothesis is discussed further below pp. 198–201). Interconnectedness is furthermore directly documented by the movement of raw materials, and connections between communities must surely have underlain the striking and widespread similarities in tomb design, indicated for example by the distribution of seven-stone antas. It appears to have been people, and not only ideas, that were moving: evidence for high levels of population mobility in the Middle Neolithic has been provided by the stable isotope and aDNA analysis of human remains from the Bom Santo burial cave in Portuguese Estremadura (Carvalho et al. 2016).

A history of previous research

Medieval documents occasionally refer to antas as landmarks in defining landholdings, but the earliest scholarly reference to a Portuguese megalithic tomb is generally believed to date from 1571, in a letter written by Frei Martinho de São Paulo, from the Convent of São Paulo on the south-western slopes of the Serra de Ossa, in the central Alentejo. Frei Martinho identified the many antas of the area around the convent as the altars on which the Lusitanian army, fighting the Romans, had made sacrifices either to ensure success in battle or in thanksgiving for victory. He refers to two antas in particular, one inside the grounds of the monastery that had recently been demolished for its stone; the other outside the monastery boundary close to the ‘porta da Anta’ (Santo António 1745, 81–2; Calado and Mataloto 2001, 12). A number of megalithic tombs survive today in the surrounding area, one of the closest being the Anta da Herdade de Candieira, with its famous ‘window’ in the backstone of the chamber (Figure 1.4). The tomb may have become the dwelling of one of the many hermits who lived in caves and other settings around the monastery, and the ‘window’ could have been cut for that purpose (Calado and Mataloto 2001, 13). The presence of ‘many antas’ was noted by Manuel Severim de Faria, canon of Évora cathedral, in his travels round the region in the early 17th century. They were interpreted, once again, as altars (Fabião 2016).

Only twenty years after Frei Henrique’s letter, in 1591, there is tantalising evidence for the ‘excavation’ of a megalithic tomb at the mouth of the Ribeira da Junqueira, near Sines on the Atlantic coast of Baixo Alentejo. Human remains and artefacts from a structure of ‘rough stones’, with a ‘door’, were stored in a box at a local church (Cardoso 2017).

In Galicia, the many thousands of burial mounds drew attention of a different kind. The record of a court case in 1609 centres on the person of Pedro Vázquez de Orjas who had been granted a licence by the King of Spain to dig into Galician burial mounds and remove the gold that he found there. In order to forestall him, the local people embarked on a campaign of clandestine looting by night, allegedly rifling some 3000 burial mounds, on the basis presumably that they considered anything held within the local mounds as their property. Hundreds of people were imprisoned and heavily fined for their presumption (Rodríguez Casal 1993, 55).

Megalithic tombs do not feature again in Portuguese historical records until the 1730s, when they were the subject of two studies presented to the Academia Real da História Portuguesa. The first of these is a dissertation by Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença (Dissertação sobre os monumentos célticos, que existem em Portugal, denominados Antas), published in the Memórias of the academy for July 1733. This mentions several antas to the north of Guarda, and one at Nisa in Alentejo, but the description of monuments that Mendonça had himself seen occupies less than one page (Mendonça de Pina 1733). The remainder of the study is devoted to speculation drawing on evidence from Classical authors and Old Testament sources for the antiquity and origin of these ‘altars’. Two months later, in September 1733, Affonso da Madre de Deus Guerreiro presented a second study to the Academia Real da História listing no fewer than 315 surviving antas, 66 of them in the area around Évora (Pereira da Costa 1868, 43–4; Leisner and Leisner 1956, xiv).

Figure 1.4. The Anta da Herdade de Candieira at Redondo, Alto Alentejo, a seven-stone chamber with fragments of two passage orthostats and slight remains of the enclosing mound. The sub-rectangular ‘window’ cut into the backstone of the chamber is of uncertain age but probably not a prehistoric feature. (Photo: Chris Scarre)

The first reference to an antiquarian excavation at any of the Portuguese megalithic monuments occurs shortly after this in a brief account by José Gaspar Simões, prior of São Teotónio de Odemira. He recounts how in 1753 he investigated a megalithic ‘altar’ in a field called ‘the antas’, near Guarda. He described a megalithic chamber, opening towards the east, consisting of five uprights supporting a capstone. Simões ordered an excavation at the entrance to the chamber and at three or four palms’ depth found a flint blade along with other polished stone tools (Simões 1753; quoted in Fabião 2016, 52–3).

These early accounts demonstrate a growing awareness from the late 16th century onwards of the large number of megalithic tombs to be found in several regions of Portugal. Yet these early references did not give rise to a sustained scholarly interest during the later 18th and earlier 19th century: there was no early antiquarian tradition in Portugal comparable to those of France, Britain or Scandinavia. This contrast may have been due to the relatively slow development of a prosperous middle class in Iberia (Díaz-Andreu 1997). Indeed, the study of Portuguese prehistory did not properly begin until the 1860s, and many of the leading proponents were geologists by profession.

The first substantial study of Portuguese antas formed the second part of a hybrid work entitled Noções sobre o Estado Prehistorico da Terra e do Homem seguidas da Descripção de alguns dolmins ou antas de Portugal (1868). Its author was Francisco António Pereira da Costa, Professor of Mineralogy and Geology in the Escola Politécnica at Lisbon and later joint Director of the Comissão Geológica de Portugal. The first part of the treatise was devoted to the geological history of the world, the second to ‘dolmins’. Some of the information was drawn from earlier sources and from local informants and colleagues, but Pereira da Costa also drew upon a 13-day visit that he had made in 1861 to the concelho of Castelo de Vide, in the north-eastern corner of the Alto Alentejo, specifically focused on its antas. With help from local landowners and their labourers he had visited and measured 13 tombs and excavated four, recovering (to his disappointment) only stone tools. The published report includes plans and elevations of several of the monuments concerned, along with some of the ground stone axes he had recovered (Pereira da Costa 1868, Plates I–III). Interestingly, Pereira da Costa noted that several of the tombs had chambers composed of seven orthostats (i.e. seven-stone antas) (Figure 1.5). The Portuguese text is accompanied by a parallel translation in French, the international scientific language of that period. Pereira da Costa also demonstrated his awareness of international scholarship on the themes of megalithic tombs. Although much of the work that he cites is francophone, he refers also to megalithic tombs in Britain and Scandinavia. In the year preceding the publication of his monograph, casts and diagrams of Portuguese prehistoric artefacts sent by Pereira da Costa had been presented by Gabriel de Mortillet to the Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistoriques at Paris (Congrès International II 1867, 31–3). The explicit aim had been to bring Portuguese prehistory, and the antas in particular, to the attention of a wider audience.

A decade later, the international perspective was espoused still more fully by Augusto Filippe Simões in his ambitious Introduçcão á Archeologia da Península Ibérica (Simões 1878). Simões devoted two chapters to megalithic monuments, drawing on a wider range of sources than Pereira da Costa, consistent with his broader geographical theme. He compared the Portuguese monuments not only with those of other regions of Iberia but also with those of France, Britain and Scandinavia.

Simões devoted considerable attention to the issue of megalithic origins and the concept of a ‘megalithic people’. This was against the background of recent proposals put forward by writers such as the Baron de Bonstetten and Alexandre Bertrand, who had postulated long and complicated journeys across Europe by a megalithic people originating in the Crimea or Asia (Bonstetten 1865; Bertrand 1864). Simões argued by contrast that the megalithic tombs of western Europe were not the work of a single migrant people but had been built by the different peoples inhabiting the regions in which they are found; and furthermore, ‘that the custom of building the dolmens spread from south to north, in the opposite direction contrary to that attributed to the migrant people’ [Julgam mais que o costume de construir os dolmens se propagaria do sul para o norte, em direcção contraria áquella que faziam seguir ao povo emigrante] (Simões 1878, 98). Simões went on to discuss the possibility and practicability of early seafaring along the Atlantic coast using only log boats, and he asked whether these voyagers might be considered the precursors of the Phoenicians. Thus his rejection of the megalithic people is coupled with an acceptance, nonetheless, of long-distance maritime contact.

The broad comparative approach adopted by Simões led him to further conclusions. First, he argued that the closest parallels for the Portuguese dolmens were to be found in those of Denmark (Simões 1878, 102: citing illustrations in the French edition of Nilsson’s Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, published in Paris in 1868). These two groups of tombs were the most primitive, and hence the earliest: manifestations of a ‘first civilisation’ of megalith building during the Neolithic period.

At the same time, Simões was struck by the difference between the Portuguese dolmens and those of Andalucía: the former mostly circular or oval, the latter rectangular, with larger, less irregular, and more vertical uprights. From this he concluded that the ‘more perfect’ Andalucian dolmens (‘os dolmens mais perfeitos’) were not as old as those of Portugal (‘os dolmens mais rudes’). The Andalucian dolmens he attributed to a ‘second civilisation’ of dolmen building, associated with the use of bronze (Simões 1878, 108). Both ‘civilisations’ were carried and spread by sailors travelling the Atlantic coasts as far as Britain and Scandinavia.

The attribution of the Andalucian dolmens to the Bronze Age derived from the evidence of the artefacts buried within them. Once again, Simões was able to draw on a wider range of evidence than had Pereira da Costa ten years earlier. He noted that Portuguese dolmens had not at that time yielded any bronze or gold items, in contrast to those of Andalucía. More significantly, Simões was the first to draw attention to the engraved stone (‘schist’) plaques (‘muitas placas de schisto negro’) that are a feature of tomb assemblages throughout south-western Iberia. Simões listed a total of 12 stone plaques, at least six of them from antas (Simões 1878, 51–3). He also described and illustrated an engraved stone báculo or crozier, a class of artefact closely related to the stone plaques in their decorative motifs, geography and finds contexts (Lillios 2008, 135–7; see also Cardoso 2016).

Figure 1.5. Plans and illustrations of Portuguese megalithic tombs from Pereira da Costa Descripção de alguns dolmins ou antas de Portugal (1868)

The next year saw publication of the first distribution map of Portuguese megalithic tombs (Silva 1879; Figure 1.6). Joaquim Possidónio Narciso da Silva was an architect who became interested in prehistoric monuments as part of a patriotic endeavour to promote Portuguese cultural heritage, and to ensure its better protection (Martins 2001, 2009a, 2009b). He became a regular participant at international conferences, and his work inspired Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius to visit Lisbon to study the artefactual material from Portuguese megalithic tombs housed in the Museu Arqueologico do Carmo (Martins 2009b; Silva 1879, 827). Possidónio da Silva also undertook a series of excavations at megalithic tombs, although with only limited reporting of the results (Silva 1882).

In northern Portugal, a key figure of this period was Francisco Martins Sarmento. His main interest lay in the Iron Age castros, but he also explored and studied the megalithic monuments of Braga and Viana do Castelo, founding the important regional museum at Guimarães in 1885 (Mendes Corrêa 1947).

A small but growing number of Portuguese megalithic tombs were being explored by excavation in the 1870s. Particularly notable was fieldwork by Carlos Ribeiro at a group of sites in Estremadura, immediately north of Lisbon (Boaventura and Cardoso 2014). Ribeiro, like Pereira da Costa, was primarily a geologist, and joint director with the latter of the Comissão Geológica de Portugal. He was responsible for the discovery of the Mesolithic shell middens at Muge in 1863, excavating at Cabeço da Arruda in 1864 where he discovered a series of human burials, and subsequently also at Moita da Sebastião. He reserved his opinion on the age of the middens, at a time when the existence of a separate Mesolithic period had yet to win general recognition, and a Neolithic attribution was initially supposed (Cardoso 2013b).

In 1878 Ribeiro excavated six of the megalithic tombs north of Lisbon. The resulting publication (Ribeiro 1880) includes plans of each site, and drawings of the principal finds including engraved stone plaques from Monte Abraão and an engraved stone báculo from the dolmen de Estria. All six had suffered previous disturbance, but the dolmen de Monte Abraão yielded a large assemblage nonetheless, with skeletal remains of an estimated 63–64 individuals (Ribeiro 1880, 59). Drawing no doubt on his experience at the Muge shell middens, Ribeiro employed sieving in the excavation at Estria, one of the earliest applications of that field technique at any megalithic tomb in western Europe.

Figure 1.6. The distribution of megalithic monuments in Portugal, from Possidónio da Silva ‘Notice sur les monuments mégalithiques du Portugal’ Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences (1879). Many of the ‘dolmens’ are already classified as ‘ruined’ or ‘destroyed’

Ribeiro’s publication was intended for an international scientific audience and included a full French translation of the Portuguese text. This growing body of Portuguese publication drew the attention of francophone archaeologists. In 1886, French prehistorian Émile Cartailhac published a 350-page survey of Iberian prehistory from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age, with the aim of reaching a wider public (Cartailhac 1886, xxxiii). The most significant contribution of foreign archaeologists, however, was not in Portugal but in south-east Spain, where Belgian mining engineers Louis and Henri Siret published their two-volume Les premiers âges du métal dans le Sud-Est de l’Espagne (Siret and Siret 1887). That was followed by the discovery and excavation of Los Millares in the 1890s. For Louis Siret, the corbel-vaulted tholos tombs were derived from Mycenae and ultimately from Egypt, and the ‘colonies’ themselves (such as Los Millares) were attributed to the Phoenicians (Siret 1913).

In Portugal, by contrast, attention focused on more regional narratives. The leading figure of the late 19th and early 20th century was José Leite de Vasconcelos, founder and first director of the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia at Lisbon. Vasconcelos sought to demonstrate that the origins of the Portuguese as a distinct people could be traced back far beyond the medieval foundation of the kingdom of Portugal following the Reconquista, to the Lusitanians of Classical antiquity, and still further, to the prehistoric period (Vasconcelos 1897, viii–xxv; Fabião 2008; Diniz 2008). He was primarily interested in linguistics and religion, attempting to document continuity from prehistory to the recent past, but he recognised the importance of archaeology as an additional source of information. In the 1890s he excavated a significant number of megalithic monuments in the Beira Alta region around Viseu. His