THE PALEOLITHIC: THE FIRST INHABITANTS The first humans to arrive to our uninhabited territory travelled over largely unknown routes from Africa before spreading throughout the Old World. The traces of these rst inhabitants in present-day Portugal date to around half a million years ago. Human remains and abandoned stone and bone utensils such as the hand axe found in the Furninha or Dominique’s Cave (Peniche) – a versatile instrument for, among other things, cutting, drilling and crushing – are among the traces left by the earliest hunter-gatherers that frequented caves on the peninsula, depositing very long successive stratigraphic layers where the remains of the now-extinct fauna can also be found.
THE NEOLITHIC: THOSE WHO WORK THE LAND By the middle of the 6th millennium BCE, the arrival of the rst agro-pastoralist communities on the Iberian Peninsula changed the face of its history forever. The dwindling numbers of those previous groups who still survived from hunting and gathering watched on as these producers of wheat, barley, goats, sheep, cattle and pigs – products that have remained a part of our diet for more than seven thousand years – rst began to work the land, initially choosing light soils that were easy to manually plough with polished stone hoes. These open air habitats were occupied for only short periods, while caves were used as burial places, as in Nascente do Almonda(Torres Novas). Group identities were a rmed in the production of ceramic vases for the confection, storage and consumption of food, decorated using shells, marking grooves and depicting various types of grain, as can be seen in the cave of Senhora da Luz (Rio Maior). MEGALITHS: LIFE WITHOUT END We do not fully understand the belief systems of the ancient Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies that built megalithic monuments to house the dead in various landscapes throughout the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE. A lack of written records keeps us from reconstructing the narratives developed by these communities in relation to the dead, the meaning of the artefacts that accompany them and the rituals that took place around these often immense stone monuments. Nonetheless, the construction of funerary structures such as the large dolmens in Alentejo and the Beiras, which required the transportation of large blocks of stone weighing several tonnes; the characters with large eyes represented in stone, ceramic and bone surrounding the dead; the artefacts of common use such as arrowheads, hand axes of polished stone, ceramic vases and exceptional pieces charged with symbolic and social value such as the schiststa ; the play of light created by the cautious construction of these monuments oriented to the rising sun, illuminating the funeral chamber literally and metaphorically; all these aspects allow us to understand that death was not necessarily considered the end of life for these communities.
THE CHALCOLITHIC: THE EMERGENCE OF THE ELITES Population growth, prosperity and possibly economic inequality seem to have created a climate of social con ict that marks the landscapes of the 3rd millennium BCE. Prosperity generated by technologies introduced from the East such as the plough and cart is inseparable from the growth of a dense network of population centres during the Chalcolithic period, some measuring dozens of hectares in size and others surrounded by robust stone walls. Growing economic development and social sophistication characterised the Chalcolithic elites, who were also distinguished by their possession of exotic and technologically advanced artefacts such as int halberds recovered in funerary monuments like the tholos tombs of Alcalar (Portimão). The unequal distribution of other exceptional artefacts in ivory, gold, amber and variscite, often brought from thousands of kilometres away, reveal that any period of social equality – whether real or imagined by modern philosophers – had come to an end by this period.
