Large curvilinear enclosures are now established as a principal instrument of human activity in Central Europe from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age(Antiquity, passim). Here the authors introduce us to examples from southern Iberia and make the case that they should be regarded as part of the same continent-wide phenomenon.

The importance of pits for archaeological inference can hardly be overstated, given their virtual omnipresence in the archaeological record. In Prehistoric Europe pits occasionally form large concentrations known as 'pit sites', where they are the most visible, sometimes the sole, remnants of past human activity. If we follow the generally accepted view of pits as grain storage containers, how can we interpret the social role played by places comprising hundreds or even thousands of pits? This paper is an attempt to shed light on this topic by summarising and critically analysing much of the current knowledge on storage of grain in non-industrial societies. We will start by gathering relevant and up-to-date experimental, ethnographic and historical data about the challenges that the storage of grain poses and how pits may have helped Prehistoric communities to overcome them. This will be followed by a discussion of their advantages and disadvantages relative to other methods: why would anybody use airtight pits instead of, for instance, weather-proofed raised granaries? Next, we will undertake an examination of the social and economic contexts in which storage pits are an effective solution as opposed to those in which their performance is far from optimal. The conclusions drawn will serve as a background against which to evaluate current interpretations concerning three selected case studies in Prehistoric Western Europe.

Neolithic ditched enclosures appear to be widely distributed across Central and Western Europe, and from the Mediterranean area to Scandinavia. They have been known in areas of Europe for a long time, but particularly in the last 25 years studies on British, French, Central European, and Scandinavian ditched enclosures have flourished. In line with this, a number of international meetings occurred in the last three decades. In southern Iberia, by contrast, ditched enclosures only began to be known in the 1970s, and even then methodological deficiencies and lack of funding hampered their characterisation. As a consequence of this, Iberian Neolithic and Copper Age ditched enclosures were largely unknown outside Portugal and Spain. They were not represented in any of the international meetings above, nor included in any of the syntheses made about the topic. Not only that, for decades, Spanish and Portuguese archaeologists were not aware of the potential analogies themselves, and the research that was being carried out elsewhere in Europe had almost no influence on the way ditched enclosures were surveyed, excavated, and interpreted in the peninsula. The main objective of this article is to advance the recognition of the southern Iberian evidence by other European researchers and the integration of the Iberian conversation into the general discussion. The focus will be on how these sites have been studied by several generations of Iberian archaeologists, in an attempt to explain why it has taken Portuguese and Spanish archaeologists so long to realise that Iberian enclosures should not be understood in isolation.

Abstract

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