Reconnecting the Late Neolithic Social Landscape: A Micro-Regional Study of Objects, Settlements and Tombs from Iberia

Abstract

The contrast between monumentalized burials and almost invisible settlements has dominated Neolithic studies in western Europe, reinforcing an artificial divide between ceremonial and economically productive landscapes. By combining a material culture approach with a landscape scale, comparative artefact studies can trace connections between people, places, and social contexts. This paper investigates social networks in Late Neolithic Portugal by examining artefact provenance, biographies, and deposition on the Mondego Plateau. It focuses on three sites and four object categories characteristic of this period. The study reveals great diversity of raw materials, circulation of everyday objects, and regional availability of resources previously thought to be imports. It suggests that people used dispersed resource areas in an integrated way, and that exchange was an integral part of routine life. Evidence for links across the region is not restricted to tombs. Burial assemblages resulted from a complex web of social relations that preceded, accompanied, and followed the actions surrounding death. Understanding these places and fundamental questions about Neolithic social production and reproduction requires reconnecting tombs and settlements into wider lived landscapes.

Past fragments: From ceramics to social practices in later prehistoric Iberia

“…Prehistoric things might have accrued meanings and these were context-specific and far from immanent or fixed. Thus, certain vessels (Figure 5) became redolent of sociality throughout their complete existence (Blanco-González, 2014b: 452; Jennings, 2014: 48–49; Jorge, 2014: 494–450), and this observation speaks volumes on their social biographies or itineraries (Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Hahn and Weiss, 2013; Meskell, 2004). By contrast, several examples, such as the case of Bell-Beaker ‘symbolically’ decorated sherds (Figure 4a), could have lost their social esteem and finished as socially deactivated refuse.…”

“…Megalithic monuments and funerary customs dated to the late fifth and fourth millennia BC (Middle Neolithic) feature highly in traditional accounts of this period, at the expense of less visible settlement archaeology. Fortunately, this panorama is improving (Díaz-del-Río, 2001; Jorge, 2014; Weiss-Krejci, 2011); narratives now cover an extended timescale and a richer variety of Neolithic depositional contexts, predominantly of early date (c. 5500–4400 BC) (Balsera et al., 2015: 141–142). These include settlements, mainly open-air and cave occupations, and mortuary expressions, such as pit burials and the deposition of dismembered human remains (Garrido-Pena et al., 2012; Weiss-Krejci, 2011).…”