1. The Mesopotamia of Tagus, Sado and Guadiana: a megalithic setting
The region of Central Alentejo is a peneplain drained by the basins of the Rivers Tagus, Sado and Guadiana and enclosed by the relatively low hills of Serra de Ossa, Serra do Mendro and Serra de Monfurado. Geologically, the region is composed of granites or related rocks and of schists (or other similar metamorphic rocks); still perceptible are some tertiary patches and a zone of carbonated rocks (marbles and dolomites). In administrative terms, Central Alentejo coincides, more or less, with the present area of the District of Évora.
On the distribution map of megalithic funerary sites (mostly passage graves) in the Iberian peninsula (Leisner and Leisner, 1959), Central Alentejo clearly stands out as the densest area, an aspect that could also be related to the presence of some exceptionally large monuments, among which is the well-known passage grave of Anta Grande do Zambujeiro (Valverde, Évora).
From the middle of the 1960's, somewhat surprisingly (since at this time, Georg and Vera Leisner had already identified and published hundreds of Alentejan passage graves), there began to emerge the first standing stones, singly or grouped in megalithic enclosures. Today, in Central Alentejo alone, more standing stones are known than in any other area of the Iberian Peninsula .
In addition, the prospecting work developed over the last twenty years in the central Alentejan region has allowed the identification of a dense network of Early Neolithic settlements which constitute also a uncommon concentration in the Iberian context.
Faced with this evidence, it appears indisputable that Central Alentejo has been the stage for "events" particularly relevant in the regional Neolithic theatre, and for a very special form of European megalithic monumentality.
The present work, with a clear regional orientation, seeks to inventory the general behaviour of non-funerary megalithic monuments in Alentejo, from a perspective which starts with an analysis of the regional landscape, at several levels, and is centred on available data and models for the genesis of the megaliths and for neolithisation in Atlantic Europe.
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Early neolithic settlements |
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Neolithic settlements |
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Tombs |
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Standing stones |
2. Standing stones and landscape
Excluding certain misleading examples, and remembering that, outside Central Alentejo, in bordering areas, megalithic enclosures are practically unknown, it is possible to group Alentejan standing stones into three main concentrations, in decreasing order in terms of the number and size of the the known monuments: Évora-Montemor, Reguengos de Monsaraz and Pavia.
The standing stones of Central Alentejo are exclusively made out of granites and, of course, their distribution in the central Alentejan landscape correlates directly with the availability of this type of rock.
This relationship does not, however, imply that the standing stones were always implanted inside the granite areas: on the contrary, the major part of them are located outside, although, in general, the distances vary between barely tens of metres and a couple of kilometres.
When we consider only the megalithic enclosures, there actually appears to have been a clear intention to avoid, systematically, their being set up over a granitic substratum. In fact, if we except the uncommon examples around Reguengos de Monsaraz (in particular the problematic monument of Xerez), the Alentejan megalithic enclosures are all located in the areas of tertiary deposits or in the gneiss zones bordering the granites.
About the solitary standing stones, a greater flexibility is noted, although, even when they are set in granitic terrain, immediate proximity to conspicuous granite outcrops has been avoided. In these cases, the locations chosen were always "glades", free from outstanding natural features.
In some cases, the Alentejan standing stones appear to demarcate the boundaries between the granites and other geological areas, lines of separation between very distinct physical landscapes and frequently special interfaces in the sacred geography (Taçon, 1999: 41).
The large megalithic enclosures of Évora-Montemor are also found along or in close proximity to another structural line of the Central Alentejan landscape: the dividing line between the hydrographic basins of the Tagus and the Sado, junction between two worlds defined by the circulation of water and, in practical terms, an important natural transit pathway.
On a more approximate scale, the dispersion of the standing stones in the immediate landscape also follows certain constants, most noticeable among which is their location close to the top of eastward-facing slopes and the decreasing size of the stones as the altitude decreases, in the case of megalithic enclosures.
3. The first settlements
Until very recently, it appeared that there were no vestiges of Early Neolithic settlements in Central Alentejo. The very first occurrence had been identified in the cave of Escoural (Santos, 1971), a context which, by being very unusual (there are no other caves in the region), would permit the supposition of an only sporadic presence of groups bringing Cardial pottery. This presence was even put in question, in a recent work, "because, up to this time, no other archaeological sites of this period are known in the interior Alentejo" (Araújo and Lejeune, 1995: 54).
However, the first work in the basin planned for the Alqueva reservoir, in the middle of the 1980's, had already brought to light (Silva and Soares, 1992) the three first open air sites attributed to ancient Neolithic moments, all of them close to the River Guadiana.
Until then, it was currently believed that the Early Neolithic was exclusively related to "the proximity of water resources, whether maritime, estuarine or fluvial" (Arnaud, 1981:31).
Still in the 1980's, another three settlements of the same period were finally discovered in the Évora-Montemor area (Gomes, 1994).
In the 1990's, within the ambit of a regional project still underway, whose objective is to contribute to the archaeological contextualization of the standing stones of Central Alentejo, a large number of Neolithic settlement sites has been identified, many of them with impressed and incised pottery, among other elements recurring in the world of southern Early Neolithic (Calado, 1995; Calado and Rocha, 1996; Calado and Sarantopoulos, 1996; Diniz and Calado, 1997), particularly the microlithic industries (bladelets, transversal arrows and burins, for example).
To these settlements, almost all located in the Évora-Montemor area, were later added others in the area of Reguengos de Monsaraz (Calado and Mataloto, 1999; Silva, 1999; Gonçalves, 2000), discovered in new survey work in the area of the planned Alqueva dam.
Beyond the various sites recently excavated or still under excavation in Alqueva (Gonçalves, 1999: 39-40), only emergency investigations were undertaken, still unpublished, in the settlement of Patalim (Montemor-o-Novo), and excavations are underway in the settlement of Valada do Mato (Évora), also unpublished, except for a preliminary report paper (Diniz and Calado, 1997).
From the perspective which here interests us, that of the relationship with the landscape, there are, nevertheless, some aspects to keep in mind: on the one hand, the extremely high density of Early Neolithic sites in the same areas where the standing stones are concentrated, and the absence of them in areas where the standing stones are scarce; on the other hand, the fact that almost all are situated in locations where there are notable granitic outcrops.
"In the whole granitic region, great boulders stand out, scattered among the fields in great blocks, at times in strange shapes", Leisner and Leisner, 1951: 14. This observation by the German archaeologists, with no great consequences, since the Leisners did not practically identify any pre-historic settlement, found a curious antecedent in the work of Virgílio Correia (Correia, 1921) which, based only on his intuition, assumed that the spaces demarcated by great granite outcrops were prehistoric sanctuaries (Correia, 1921: 97-101).
As a matter of fact, this preference for special geologic features is largely verified in innumerable ethnographic and archaeological parallels (Taçon, 1999: 40, 44; Buikstra and Charles, 1999: 203; Barnes, 1999: 111; Knapp and Ashmore, 1999: 11, 15; Theodoratus and Lapena, 1998: 23; Mulk, 1998: 125; Bender et al., 1997; Bradley, 1997: 95).
The same question was recently analysed in a pre-historic landscape of south-west England, in a work that underlines the emergence of the phenomenon still in the Mesolithic period, when the outcrops would have been given cultural value as "natural megaliths", not at all domesticated, while in the Neolithic period the same were integrated into habitational or ritual man-made enclosures (Tilley, 1996: 165).
The similarity between certain granitic tors and some of the damaged megaliths suggested to R. Bradley another line of interpretation, according to which not only is it possible that the monuments were inspired by natural rock formations, but also that these formations were regarded, by Neolithic peoples, as ancestral monuments in ruins (Bradley, 1998: 20).
In the case of Alentejo, I could also accept an appropriation by the first Neolithic "colonisers" of places to which cultural significance would have been attributed by Mesolithic populations (their ancestors) settled on the lower ground of the adjacent estuaries.
The fact that the granitic terrain was situated several hours journey from the Tagus and Sado estuaries, where the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had their logistical bases, does not stand in the way of its being, initially, the object of consecration. There are many other cases of heterotopia of sacred places in relation to the world of daily living (Tilley, 1991: 137; Bradley, 1997: 6).
We must remember that the estuarine landscape totally lacks rocky outcrops and that "sacred sites and places are sometimes physically empty or largely uninhabited, and situated at some distance from the populations for which they hold significance" (Hirsch, 1997: 4).
In the same way as the standing stones, the Early Neolithic settlements in Central Alentejo can be grouped into three main concentrations, also in decreasing order of the number of sites and, in this case, their apparent antiquity: Évora-Montemor, Reguengos de Monsaraz and Pavia. Note that Cardial pottery is only known, at present, in the first of these groups while, in the last, impressed pottery itself is only vestigial.
4. Waterworlds
"nor need we assume that the 'frontier' was between intrusive and indigenous populations: the communities on the Neolithic side may themselves have been indigenous people who had adopted the Neolithic way of life" (Patton, 1994: 288).
Almost completely absent from Portuguese literature about the emergence of megalithic culture in Central Alentejo, is the possibility of a relationship with the Late Mesolithic populations of the Tagus-Sado shell middens, despite the geography of the area strongly suggesting it (Arnaud, 1981: 33).
The principal reason for this lacuna stems from, on the one hand, the model (still) in use, which considers the megaliths as a late phenomenon in the process of neolithisation, having taken as certain the supposed existence of a previous phase, sometimes designated as pre-megalithic Neolithic (Diniz, 1994), with impressed pottery and microlithic industries, and with no monumentality at all; on the other hand, and because of the absence of concrete data, the "domestication"of Central Alentejo has been attributed to Middle Neolithic populations, bringers of plain pottery and burying their dead in proto-megalithic graves (Zilhão, 1992: 162; Carvalho, 1998: 55), and hence without any direct link with the Late Mesolithic groups.
Nowadays, with the indisputable presence, on a previously unsuspected scale, of a strong, interior Early Neolithic, with impressed pottery, including Cardial, it is essential to start evaluating the eventual relationship between the first Neolithic occupants of Central Alentejo and the populations who, in the Tagus and Sado estuaries, would have been, at the same time, on transition towards the Neolithic way of life and to the abandonment of the traditional estuarine settlements.
Central Alentejo is intimately connected to both the estuaries of the Tejo and the Sado, through their respective hydrographic networks and the ridges that separate them; it is, in this context, like a boundary area where different types of contact and interaction between the communities of both Mesolithic groups could have been performed.
It is clear that, if we admit the existence of links (of cooperation or of competition) between the populations of the shell middens of the Tagus and of the Sado, this naturally implies a particular valuation of Central Alentejo, which stands out as the common hinterland for the two areas.
The Neolithic occupation of Central Alentejo had, forcibly, to thrust itself into any process of colonisation, since the region was virtually depopulated somewhere around the middle of the 6th millennium; the hunter-gatherers, settled in tertiary terrain, without rocky outcrops, were certainly frequenters, more or less sporadic, of the Central Alentejan granites, situated around one day's journey away (a half day in the case of the Sado). As I suggested before, that frequentation could have been more for ritual than for economic purposes, considering the distances involved.
The available data naturally allow alternative readings; nevertheless, I think that the Mesolithic populations of the shell middens of the Tagus and the Sado could have been responsible for the neolithisation of the interior territory. In the beginning of the 5th milenium, or a little before, the substitution of one economy by another was in progress, in the context of a more global change and centred in a geographic setting which, despite being contiguous, was radically distinct from traditional Mesolithic landscapes.
I believe that it is in this ambience of rupture and of innovation (and, eventually, of competition between radically different ways of life) that the ferment for the "invention" itself of the megaliths should be sought.
It is not certain whether the Mesolithic groups, as such, could have been responsible for the oldest megaliths, but it is certainly possible that these people, or a part of them, had been the first megalith builders already in a phase of deep cultural and economic changes.
And, as everything indicates, the first manifestations of the megalithic phenomenon in Central Alentejo were precisely the standing stones and the megalithic enclosures, perhaps side by side with discreet protomegalithic funeral monuments.
5. Twinning Central Alentejo and Brittany
"The earliest Neolithic monuments in Brittany and Portugal may have been created while Mesolithic cemeteries were still in use" (Bradley, 1998: 34).
The comparison between Breton and Alentejan megaliths is not something new in Portuguese bibliography (Jorge, 1977; Calado, 1990; Gonçalves, 1996; Gonçalves, 1999; Gomes, 2000), although, in no case has it been discussed sufficiently or in sufficient depth in terms of its more relevant implications; at the same time, this relationship is almost imperceptible in studies about the Breton megaliths.
It is also curious that, for reasons that are, to a certain point, related to the isolated worlds of the archaeological research, the comparisons between the shell middens of the Tagus and the Sado and those of Hoëdic and Téviec (Arnaud, 1987: 63), never spilled over into the broader question of the eventual relationship between the last hunter-gatherers and the first megalith builders.
Again, the question is that whether among the defenders of the indigenous models or on the side of the supporters of the colonialist thesis, everybody accepted that the megalithic phenomenon (and this, naturally, was only thought of as funerary megaliths) could only occur in a mature phase of the agro-pastoral system.
In this theoretical picture, the existence of an axiomatic pre-megalithic Neolithic had to be accepted; however, although the idea itself of pre-Neolithic megaliths should also be considered, I believe that, in Alentejo as well as in Brittany, we should attribute the erection of some of the standing stones, to indigenous people involved in a process of change, or recently converted, to the neolithic way of life.
Some years ago, in fact reviving a classic observation (Bradley, 1997: 18), A. Sherrat noted the overlap between the most important European megalithic areas and the greatest concentrations of population during the Late Mesolithic (Sherrat, 1990: 156), although he paid very little attention to the Portuguese reality.
In Brittany, the existence of Mesolithic burials with stone structures, and with chronologies predating the arrival of the first Neolithic influxes, has inspired many authors to consider them the models for the first protomegalithic funerary monuments (Renfrew, 1976; Scarre, 1992: 129; Thorpe, 1996: 61; Thomas, 1996: 132; Whittle, 1996: 251).
On the other hand, the discovery, beginning in the 1980's, of the re-use of certain large Breton standing stones in the construction of megalithic and protomegalithic funerary monuments (Er-Grah, Table des Marchand, Gavrinis, Mané-Rutual, Mané-er-Hroëk, Petit Mont d'Arzon, Mané-Lud), has implied, since then, the still somewhat hesitant acceptance of an older date for the non-funerary megaliths (L'Helgouach, 1983; Le Roux, 1984; Patton, 1993; Thorpe, 1996: 59).
Later, other observations of a chronological nature have come to confirm the antiquity of some of the Breton standing stones, particularly the discovery of the remains of possible standing stones in a VSG settlement (Cassen at al., 1998), or the presence of a possible standing-stone socket under the oldest tumulus of Petit Mont d'Arzon (Lecornec, 1994; Bradley, 1998: 56. 58).
However, faced with the imprecise nature of the dating of standing stones, the discussion about the genesis of the megaliths in this area (almost always understood as the genesis of the European megalithic monumentality) has been centred, as a rule, on the question of the relative age between the elongated tumuli, with closed funerary structures or even without stone structures at all, and the passage graves, for which certain datings exist (possibly arguable) from the first half of the 5th millennium (Boujot et al., 1998: 150); whatever the solution is, we should also consider the possibility that the standing stones constitute the very first essays of true megalithic monumentality, even if coexisting with other types of monuments.
When, in 1990, I proposed, for the first time, a genesis for the standing stones earlier than for the passage graves, the data to support this hypothesis were scarce (Calado, 1990); certainly, the case of two standing stones being stratigraphically superimposed by a megalithic grave was already known in Portugal; in fact, those who did the excavation affirmed that "there can be no doubt that (the standing stones) are older than the construction of the monument, because they were already fixed there in the terrain when the large funerary construction was built and were then included in the enormous mound which covered everything" (Almeida and Ferreira, 1972: 168).
The discovery of most of the settlements with impressed pottery (Calado, 1995; Calado and Rocha, 1995; Calado and Sarantopoulos, 1995) in clear spatial association with the principal occurrences of standing stones, on the one hand, and the publication of some radiometric dates for standing stones in other regions of Portugal (Gomes, 1994; Oliveira, 1997), even if contested (Zilhão, 1998: 39-40), have come, in recent years, to give support to the proposed relative chronology and to suggest a cultural bridge between Alentejo and Brittany.
Bradley noted, in a recent work, that "in three regions, the Tagus valley, Morbihan and the Irish Sea, there are remains of shell middens. The first two of these groups are also associated with Mesolithic cemeteries" (Bradley, 1997: 21).
Following the same reasoning, we can view a number of further significant coincidences between Brittany and Central Alentejo (which, as we have seen, is the spatial background of the Tagus and Sado valleys).
Beyond the analogy between the respective Mesolithic substrata and the antiquity of the oldest standing stones of both regions, other points of contact between Brittany and the south of Portugal exist.
One of the most exclusive aspects is to be seen in the plan of the Breton megalithic enclosures: most of those structures are in the form of a horseshoe, with the opening facing the east (Scarre, 1998: 59); down in Alentejo, with some variations, all of the megalithic enclosures, whose plan is still more or less recognisable, also display that morphology.
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| Plans of Alentejan megalithic enclosures |
Zooming in on the standing stones, we note that the iconographic themes represented in Brittany and in Alentejo suggest deep contacts between the communities who conceived and "used" them: thus, the crook, the dominant motif on the Alentejan standing stones, which, associated with other specific themes, is also present on the decorated menhirs of Brittany, most of them also carved with the technique of low relief (Patton, 1993: 90, 91).
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| The crook of Monte da Ribeira standing stone; modern alentejan shepherd with a crook. |
Another of the recurrent themes in the larger Alentejan megalithic enclosures (Almendres, Portela de Mogos and Vale Maria do Meio) is the lunar crescent, repeatedly associated with a quadrangular shape; the same iconographic elements exist, in turn, carved on some Breton standing stones, a parallel that was observed for the first time by Jacques Briard (Briard, 1997: 21), comparing the menhir of Kermaillard with one of Almendres. The same motifs, represented on the reverse of the frontal stele of Table des Marchand, are very similar to the Portuguese carvings (Figure 2) and were recently interpreted as symbolising, respectively, the chtonian world and the earth.
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| Similar motifs on decorated standing stones: Table des Marchands (Boujot et al., 1998) and Vale Maria do Meio. |
It is premature to try to establish a genetic affiliation between the Breton and Alentejan standing stones, in one or other direction; it is preferable, in our current state of knowledge, that they are considered generically contemporary, although some current explanations, based on a supposed independent parallel invention (Renfrew, 1972), are, in my view, not very convincing.
In any case, it is natural, if we admit a scenario of regular contacts between the Mesolithic peoples of Atlantic Europe and, eventually, a special contact between the Breton and Alentejan groups, that the inventions had effectively circulated, in both diections.
Indeed, the discussion about the origin of the Breton Neolithic has come to be mainly centred on two opposed readings: on one side, those who seek to link it to the groups of Central European ascendancy (post-LBK), through the Parisian basin, and on the other, those who, evaluating certain elements of material culture, prefer to place it in a southern Neolithic with Mediterranean affinities.
In the latter case, the most reasonable option appears to be the one which postulates a connection with the Neolithic Cardial of Mediterranean France, through the Garonne valley (Scarre, 1992), recognisable in some decorative solutions of impressed pottery; another option, however, was suggested by R. Bradley, to allow, "two major axes, one extending from the West Mediterranean around the coastline of Portugal and Spain and into Western France. The other appears to have connected Northern France and the British Isles with developments that began in the Rhineland" (Bradley, 1997: 23).
Whatever, it is indisputable that, in Brittany, Cardial and LBK influences were mingled, a confluence patent in the diversity of Breton Neolithic monumentality itself.
In Central Alentejo, the material culture of the oldest Neolithic settlements inserts itself, without incongruity, into a cultural stream generally pointing to the western Mediterranean.
In summary, the analogies which we detect between the megaliths in Alentejo and in Brittany could better originate from the respective Mesolithic substrata, since in neither case do we find standing stones in cultural contexts from which the respective Neolithic material cultures could be derived.
In western France, A. Sherrat, emphasising the fact that the dates attributed to the sites with impressed pottery, of southern derivation, were later than those which were accepted for the first Neolithic monuments, sought to relate these to the arrival of influences from Central-European Neolithic (Sherrat, 1990: 152), which, despite being probable for the elongated tombs, it would be difficult to apply to the megalithic monuments, particularly the standing stones.
The symbology of the crooks, for which many diverse readings have been proposed, is, in my opinion, perfectly coherent with the mental ambience that characterised the Neolithic "revolution"; the crook could symbolise the adoption of a pastoral way of life, thus representing, in a naturalistic form, the instrument which allows, in material terms, the dominion of the shepherd over the flock (Figure 3) (Thorpe, 1996: 59; Calado, 1997a: 47).
The crook, displayed almost always in a prominent place on the surface of the biggest standing stones, appears to imply the strong affirmation of a choice, of a way of life.
It is clear that it is a symbol which remains (or reappears) at later times, having gained, with time and in other cultural contexts, more complex connotations. Egyptian and Christian crook symbols, for example, came to evoke the dominion (spiritual, but not only) of the chief in relation to the "flock"; it is in this context of the continuity of great symbols, (with semantic evolution) that I believe we should evaluate the significance of the crooks, already very stylised, which occur, as movable objects, in the Alentejan passage graves (Calado, 1997a: 47).
To conclude this approximation between the Breton and the Alentejan standing stones, it is appropriate to look at and comment on some of the best-known differences.
The most important and obvious is the scale. Although morphologically (and in terms of the raw material) the decorated standing stones of Morbihan approximate to their Alentejan congeners, the dimensions of the former generally represent values (length, thickness and weight) which at least double those of the latter.
This difference should, possibly, be related to the differential demographic potential in both regions. We must remember that the Morbihan is a large area of great ecological potential, joining the agricultural and livestock raising capacity, together with the estuarine and marine resources; Central Alentejo is far from the water and with much worse farming soils.
The neolithisation of Breton Mesolithic communities did not imply the abandonment of the region: effectively, there has been a certain interiorisation of the settlement, but nothing in comparison to Alentejo in relation to the Tagus and Sado estuaries.
The association of the crook and the axe, present on the Breton standing stones, appears to imply a steady and full Neolithic economy; in contrast, the absence of axes represented on Alentejan standing stones could be explained by a lower degree of neolithisation (with an economy based almost exclusively on the flocks); until now, this hypothesis has not been contradicted by archaeological data.
In Brittany the arrival of cultural influxes originating in loessial lands, where agriculture (and the domestication of bovines) is well documented, from the beginning, could help to explain some of the differences revealed in the iconography.
The recourse to domesticated bovines as a source of traction for the transport and the erection of standing stones, although difficult to verify, could as well explain the differences in size between the Breton and the Alentejan standing stones; in Alentejo, pastoral activity settled into the rearing of sheep and goats, as is the rule in Mediterranean Neolithic.
The representation of a bovine on a standing stone, whose fragments are shared out among the monuments of Table des Marchand, Er-Grah and Gavrinis, could, in fact, symbolically represent this reality.
On that same standing stone, on the top of the iconographic field, is carved an enigmatic motif, currently "translated" as "hache-charrue" but which Cassen and Vaquero-Lastres (Cassen and Vaquero-Lastres, n.p.) did recently propose, with convincing arguments, to represent a whale; this interpretation allows us to "read" an ordered sequence of different economic activities that were practised by the people who made the monument.
From bottom to top we have the axe, the crook, the goat (?), the ox and the whale, symbolising agriculture, animal husbandry (ovicaprine and bovine) and hunting/fishing.
These categories cannot be exhausted in their obvious economic connotations: they possibly reflect ideologies, conflicts and negotiations between ways of life which constitute, at this time and in this region, the fundamental options.
However, if we accept an economic reference for the symbols publicly displayed on this monument, we perhaps better understand the magnificence of the Breton megaliths: the ecological diversity would perhaps correspond to an economic diversification inherited from three convergent worlds: the strong Mesolithic substratum, on the one hand, and the cultural influxes received from the Parisian basin and from the Mediterranean-Atlantic world, on the other.
In Central Alentejo, the Neolithic "revolution" seems to have occurred in a most traumatic form: the traditional territories were abandoned and, at the same time, all of the extraordinary ecological/economic potential that they offered.
The river mouth was exchanged for the source. A landscape with water and without rocks was exchanged for another, very dry and rocky.
The crook is the only symbol with economic connotation obviously represented on the Alentejan standing stones and, in the artefacts found in Early Neolithic sites, there are few archaeological indicators of agriculture: rare polished stone, scarce elements of grindstones (Diniz and Calado, 1997).
In Morbihan, however much the estuarine gatherer activities had declined with the adoption of the Neolithic economy and however much the whale of the "hache-charrue" refers more to symbolic aspects without a truly direct economic implication, it is obvious that the constructers of standing stones had at their disposal undoubted riches, provided by aquatic resources.
I believe that we can synthesise the principal landscape differences, stating that the Mesolithic groups of the Tagus-Sado lived a long way away from granite, and the Neolithic groups of Central Alentejo lived a long way away from estuaries. In Morbihan, granite and estuary make up the same landscape.
6. The lost paradise
As I have suggested above, it is difficult to interpret the analogies between Tagus-Sado and Brittany in terms of autonomous foci in the "invention" of the megalithic phenomenon. There were, of course, different developments, but it is necessary to accept direct contacts, sometimes of a special nature, between the Mesolithic populations and in paths to the Neolithic way of life, in the two areas, between the 6th and the 5th millennia BC. Later, there was diversification of and alteration to this framework of relations, seen particularly in the different solutions in funerary architecture.
In Central Alentejo, the discovery of more and more closed funerary monuments, some in stratigraphic situations which assure that they are earlier than passage graves, allows for new bridges between Brittany and Portugal, including Galicia (Bello-Diéguez, 1995: 49) and, less directly and just a little later, Ireland.
In this framework, the connection by sea (Bradley, 1997) between areas as distant as Brittany and Tagus-Sado appears the most plausible, especially because the common elements (shell middens, horseshoe enclosures, standing stones decorated with crooks) do not exist in any intermediate area.
When, ten years ago, I wrote that, "the standing stones could thus represent the first moments of the occupation of the region by megalithic peoples, performing, at the same time as humanising elements of space, the role of appropriation and identification", and observed that, "the megalithic enclosures of Cuncos, Portela de Mogos and Almendres are situated more or less along the line of the ridge which separates the basins of the Tagus and the Sado", or even when I established certain parallels with Brittany (Calado, 1990), I never dared to implicate Mesolithic peoples in the process.
In 1993, I wrote that "the standing stones could constitute the physical vestiges of sedentary settlement foundation rituals of groups establishing themselves apart from the communities settled on the coast and in the estuaries of the great rivers" (Calado, 1993: 296); in 1995, I proposed, finally, that "the abandonment of the shell middens and the eventual collapse of the economic model in which they flourished, could have had their origin in the settling of the respective populations in the Alentejan interior, at the boundary of the territories traditionally exploited with a wide-spectrum economic model " (Calado, 1995).
It was, I now recognise, a question of scale: it was, from the beginning, a view unconsciously closed within the frontiers of Central Alentejo.
It appears to me, symmetrically, that most authors who have not accepted the relationship between the shell-middens of Tagus-Sado and Central Alentejo, have done so, unconsciously, for reasons of point of view, that is, through having approached the question from a markedly coastal perspective.
Today, I believe that the "collapse of the economic model" is not sufficient to explain, on its own, the deep social and mental ruptures which are detected in the context of the regional neolithisation.
In the words of A. Whittle, "becoming Neolithic may have been much more a spiritual conversion than a matter of changing diets" (Whittle, 1996: 8).
The profound question with which I would like to finish is: what motivated the abandonment of the estuaries and the moving to the interior, and at what point is it possible to relate this question to the title of this work?
7. Bibliography
Almeida, F.; Ferreira, O.V. (1971) - Um monumento pré-histórico na Granja de S. Pedro (Idanha-a-Velha). Actas do II Congresso Nacional de Arqueologia. Lisboa, I, p. 163-168.
Alvim, P. (1996-97) - Sobre alguns vestígios de paleoastronomia no cromeleque dos Almendres. A Cidade de Évora. Évora: C.M. Évora, II-2, p.
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