Estudos do Quaternário Quaternary Studies

The protohistoric fortified landscape on the coastline between the Âncora and Lima valleys: archaeological and spatial perspectives

Nuno Oliveira — 2026-10-22

This article examines the Iron Age fortified settlements located between the estuaries of the Âncora and Lima rivers, on the coast of north-western Portugal. The research combines a review of the available literature and archaeological evidence with the analysis of LiDAR imagery, field survey and the study of the collected materials. The results enable the identification of previously unknown sites and defensive structures, the reassessment of the layout of known settlements and a more precise definition of their occupational sequences, which in some cases began in the Late Bronze Age and continued into the Roman period. They also highlight the diversity of defensive arrangements, the relationship between settlement location and topography, and the extensive visibility over river valleys and the coastal platform. The presence of local products and imported materials further indicates the integration of these communities into regional and wider networks of circulation and interaction. This study therefore contributes to a broader understanding of settlement organisation, locational strategies and the development of coastal communities in the north-western Iberian Peninsula during the Late Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the beginning of the Roman period.

Reassessing Bronze Age funerary practices in Western Iberia: New evidence from the necropolis of Montes Novos (Penafiel, Portugal)

Hugo Aluai Sampaio — 2026-10-28

The archaeological site of Montes Novos (Penafiel, Northern Portugal) was discovered in 1987 and comprised a set of remains associated mainly with Roman-period funerary practices. However, it also included various other ceramic artefacts, either whole or nearly complete, whose techno-morphological features and associations with negative structures allow for their broad relation to a regional Bronze Age necropolis.

The study of the shelved data collected during the excavation work - part of which available at the Museu Municipal de Penafiel (MMPNF) - highlights the continuity of funerary practices at the site, and allows for the consideration of the construction, over time, of a mortuary landscape. The parallels between negative structures associated to certain ceramic containers exhumed there and other synchronous contexts, leveraged by radiocarbon dating, corroborate the hypothesis that these funerary practices date back (at least) to the regional Late Bronze Age.

How did the incumbent Mesolithic hunter-gatherers respond to the arrival of Neolithic agro-pastoralists in the Central Mediterranean Basin, as documented in the archaeological record?

Michael Templer — 2026-11-02

The transition from the need for humanity to live in symbiosis with nature, to being able to change and control it through agriculture and animal husbandry, is the seminal moment when demographic growth was no longer constrained by the carrying capacity of natural resources obtained from hunting, fishing, and gathering. Over a little more than ten thousand years, the rupture of these constraints has engendered the exponential growth of humanity and the consequent changes to the natural habitat to which we are witnesses. This article presents case studies of the varying responses from Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities at four sites and in three regions on the north side of the Central Mediterranean basin, when confronted with the immigrant Neolithic agro-pastoralists originating from the Fertile Crescent, in the Aegean Basin, the Balkans, Sicily, and the Adriatic, as far as the Adige Valley in the foothills of the Southern Alps.