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The principal aim of this short chapter is to present some ideas and suggest possible directions of research concerning the development of the north-western Portuguese Iron Age, and in particular its late—and most dynamic—phase, that which coincided with Roman acculturation and conquest, towards the end of the first century BC. These processes of acculturation and conquest, and their impact on the Iron Age communities of the region, have long been the subject of discussion and indeed misunderstanding. Many unresolved questions and contradictions have blurred the construction of a coherent picture which is only now starting to take shape, though not necessarily providing definitive answers. If there was an effective military conquest, where is the evidence for the destruction of sites in the archaeological record? If the northwest was already conquered and pacified, why were the local communities building and reinforcing defensive walls? If the Romans were controlling this region, why were hillforts still being built in the traditional indigenous fashion? Generations of archaeologists, myself included, have attempted to answer some of these questions in the course of our research. The Iron Age cultures of northwest Iberia are broadly characterized by hillfort settlements built in stone, either granite or schist. These hillforts, known locally as ‘castros’, provide the name by which the culture is generally known: ‘cultura castreja’, in Portugal, or ‘cultura castrexa’ in Galicia. The word ‘castro’ obviously derives from the Latin ‘castrum’, in the sense of defended settlement. Francisco Martins Sarmento introduced this terminology following his major excavation work at the Citânia de Briteiros, from the 1870s onwards. Martins Sarmento’s excavation and survey work, combined with his remarkable capacity for observation and analysis, brought the Castro culture to widespread international attention, particularly after the Ninth International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, held in Lisbon in 1890. Despite this promising start, the Castro culture remained little known to most European archaeologists until the last few decades of the twentieth century, save for the contribution made by Christopher Hawkes (1971; 1984).

FRANCISCO M.V. REIMAO QUEIROGA TWO IBERIAN TORCS IN THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD Summary. The main objective of this paper is to describe two Iberian Iron Age gold torcs from the collection of the Ashmolean Museum. 'Iheir study, mostly based on typological aspects, is used to determine the origin of the two ornaments, which is concluded to be the Iberian northwest, thus corroborating the information in the Ashmolean Museum records. An integration of the two t o m within the existing typological groups of Northwestern Castros torcs is attempted, as a means of determining their geographical origin accurately. Other aspects, such as the signijicance of this kind of ornament in the Iron Age, are also considered.

The statue of wild boar from Ramilo, now presented, was recently discovered in the course of agricultural work within the boundaries of the Duas Igrejas parish, Miranda do Douro Council, in a property named Ramilo. This is an important find amongst the existing statues of the kind, as it represents a male wild boar depicted with a number of sculpted details that altogether add to the definition of the typologies of representation of the boar statues so far found in this region.