Castanheiro do Vento (Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Portugal)

Location of the site in Iberian Peninsula, to the south of the river Douro.
The hill of Castanheiro do Vento was a highly symbollic focal point for local populations in the III and II millenia b.C.
"They" were, in modern language, landscape architects, land artists, performers... the task of building itself was the main goal of the place.
But, once constructed, it could be subjected to transformations.
And it was a setting, a stage, for performing acts that we tend to call rituals. However, as all human action is in a certain way symbolic, we should not stress too much the ritual versus daily life: these are modern dichotomies which may or may not exist in other societes.
So spacial concentration was also a intensification of meaning: this kind of sites were pregant of histories, events, social ties absolutely vital for the very existence and the regeneration of sociality.

Three of the numerous structures with a D shaped plan. They are part of different concentric walls of the precinct. In the traditional line of interpretation, they were called "bastions", because people thought that these monumental places could only have a prime motivation: defence.

Two smaller structures of the site. Stone, vegetal materiais, and clay were used as main building "raw materials". The material properties of them shall not be seen in a purely, modern, functional way: each piece of the site was intentionally chosen to be included in this special meaning device (the hill a a whole), probably a sort of microcosmos.
In order to understand all this, we need to imagine what is "missing", but is forcefully implied in these structures: the enormous quantity of water, for instance, involved in the very process of building earthen walls. In that consists the activity of archaeology: it is exactly a methodology to deduce the invisible from the visible (to put it in a schematic, rather simplistic way)...

One of the entrances (passages) of the monumental precinct. To both sides of it, we can see the stony base of the walls (schist). All these remains must be seen as a sort of a "skeleton" of an enormous earthen building, probably made out of cob.

2007's excavations are approaching... next July!
Informations: ana.m.vale@gmail.com
Above: some images of the site (2005' s excavation season): its location and some of its details... as an aperitif...