Studies in Iberian Archaeoastronomy: (8) Orientations of Megalithic and Tholos Tombs of Portugal and Southwest Spain

Abstract

In this, the penultimate in this series of Studies, we complete our coverage of the peninsula by discussing megalithic tombs of north Portugal and of three provinces of southwest Spain. We also investigate the tholos tombs omitted from previous Studies of western Iberia. In a final Study we shall consider the picture that has emerged from our examination of nearly a thousand Iberian tombs.Tombs of the Minho, the coastal area of northern Portugal, were discussed in the fifth Study, as were the tombs of the central region around Viseu; in the present article we publish amplified lists of the tombs of these regions, and extend our coverage to the tombs of the adjacent areas. For southern Portugal our earlier discussion was confined to megalithic tombs, and so here we include a section on tholos (false-cupola) tombs. Finally, we investigate the west Andalusian provinces of Cadiz, Cordoba and Sevilla, including two great tholos tombs west of the city of Seville that may have had stellar orientations.Northern Portugal does not have the dense concentrations of megalithic tombs that we find in the Alentejo, but -as befits a region on the Atlantic seaboard -the tombs are among the earliest in western Europe. The Douro river runs from east to west and enters the sea at the city of Porto, and we use it to divide northern Portugal into five regions: the North Douro Basin, two regions that are further north of the river, and two that are south of it.Those orientations that are listed here for the first time were assembled by the authors between 1997 and 2000, with the collaboration of Nuno Miguel Soares, Carla Stockler and Claudia Alemao. One of the two northerly regions -the Minho -and one of the southerly ones -the Beiras, otherwise the Mondego Platform -were featured in a previous study,"! and we here supplement the previous lists with a further 12 tombs. For the three new regions we report 26 orientations, so that Table A I lists 38 tombs whose orientations appear here for the first time, together with 48 tombs whose orientations are repeated from an earlier Study 0142-7273/0110026-0045/$2.50

Studies of archaeoastronomy in Spain: a review

“…(10) dad de Salamanca, había realizado una investigación multidisciplinar pionera sobre las orientaciones astronómicas de quince dólmenes del occidente peninsular, en la que participaron con ella un etnólogo y un astrónomo (López Plaza et al 1991-92). El autor británico se propuso medir las orientaciones de todos los megalitos peninsulares, actividad que quedó reflejada en la serie de ocho artículos, "Studies in Iberian Archaeoastronomy", editados entre 1994 y 2001 en la revista Archaeoastronomy en colaboración con autores españo-les (Hoskin et al 1994(Hoskin et al , 1995(Hoskin et al , 1995b(Hoskin et al , 2001Hoskin y Palomo 1998;López Plaza et al 1997. Hoskin y Sauch 1999Gómez Ruiz y Hoskin 2000) (Tabla 3).…”