Poster presented to a conference in Leicester 2006

Conference “Material Culture, Identities and Inclusion”
Department of Museum Studies,
University of Leicester, UK
9 - 10 February 2006

“Prehistoric architecture” and the “constitution of society” :
an interrogative view from northern Portugal
poster by
Vítor Oliveira Jorge


We know well that the concepts of “architecture” or “society” are modern, western, ours. They are not automatically applicable to other peoples of the world, especially to those communities who do not share with us a “naturalistic” epistemology (Philippe Descola, 2005). But even having that in mind, we can never free from our own culture, or imagine that we could approach reality as if we were above it, or outside it. So the materialities we study as archeologists, and the interpretations we try to built, are problematic. As problematic is their transmission to the public, i.e., the visitor of a museum, a site, a historic landscape, or the reader of a non-specialized book.
All this has much to do with the theme of this conference: “material culture”, identity / alterity, inclusion / exclusion – what a series of questions these topics raise! It is impossible to focus on them in the frame of a single poster…in fact, as an archaeologist, I have been working and writing on these matters for a long time. But, having published mostly in Portuguese, our main results and prospects are not so much known abroad as they probably should be. So, one of the goals of this poster is actually to call attention of other colleagues to our work, and to the fruitful conditions of collaboration that our university may offer. Already in 1998 we started publishing a new journal in English – “Journal of Iberian Archaeology” (annual; 8 issues available until now) – with that idea of international collaboration in mind.
My particular field of study is the so-called “prehistoric architectures” of northern Portugal (since 1978). Me, my colleague Susana Oliveira Jorge (DCTP-FLUP) and, later, several other archaeologists (namely our colleague Maria de Jesus Sanches – DCTP-FLUP, etc.), we have tried to improve prehistoric research in this area of Iberia (located, from north to south, between Galicia in Spain and the southern margin of the river Douro), encouraging the formation of research teams (see web page mentioned above).
Two types of sites have been the object of our attention: passage graves (“megaliths” – Neolithic; 4.500-3.500 b. C.); and, on the other hand, a sort of precincts that we may call “monumentalized hills” (Copper and Bronze Age – c. 3.000-1.300 b. C.). It was one of these second kinds of sites that S. O. J. has studied since 1989 – Castelo Velho, in Freixo de Numão (in the Foz Côa region, located in Portuguese High Douro, i. e., in the northest of Portugal) -, now open to visitors as a place in the dependency of Portuguese Heritage Institute (IPPAR- Ministry of Culture). The excavations in a similar site, Castanheiro do Vento (some 11 km away of Castelo Velho) started in 1998.
This last place is a very important one, because it is bigger and better conserved than the other mentioned above, but also because we may apply to the site’s excavation, interpretation, and restoration, all the experience that we have acquired in the same field and region throughout the last 17 years. Also – last but not least – we need to create a comprehensible discourse about the meaning of these sites for their visitors, as long as for the visitors of the local museum, whose building is already available and restored.
The background problem (a matter of communication and of research) is always the same basic one: how to translate our questions about the past into a message publicly useful and effective? How to conceal science (based in doubt) with the heritage industry (based in certitude)? How to be assertive and easy to understand – process implied in the commodification of the past and tourism - and not to hide the plurality of interpretations and possible meanings? Is there a place for plurality in museum displays and site presentations? Maybe.
Just to remember two well known examples of that possibility: we may currently use techniques of computer simulation to show and experiment alternative interpretations of past landscapes, communities, techniques of construction, general and particular layouts of monuments (zooming in and out, diversifying the view points, etc.). And we may apply the principles of experimental archaeology to the restoration of the site itself, monitoring diverse reversible hypothesis of building processes in different areas of the site.
“Architecture studies”, in the field of prehistoric Europe, and the new interpretation problems they raise, are not an exhausted matter; to the contrary, they have just started. As the XIX century and most part of the XX century were focused on time (history, evolution etc.), it is the questions of space and place that are now increasingly attracting our attention. In a post-fordist world, where the leisure industries and the generalized consumption of signs are the rules, people tend more and more to search for places and landscapes charged with a mythical meaning. Tourism is the most prominent international industry, and the market demands continuously the invention of new products, of new spaces of evasion, asking for creativity. Will archaeology, itself a product of modernity, benefit from all this post-modern movement and feeling? Probably. It depends on us, too.
So, we need to improve systematic field research and, at the same time, to invent completely new ways of looking into the “prehistoric monuments” which have defied for centuries popular and educated imaginations.
In our particular case, we have much to learn from colleagues (architects, social anthropologists interested in technological matters, restorers, etc.) working on traditional techniques. One of the increasingly focused fields is the circum-mediterranean earthen “architectures”, past and present.
For instance, the case of Castanheiro do Vento. Transforming a hill into a monumental device turned to a fluvial basin, past populations created there the endured scenic conditions for choreographing order; and doing so together, they were able to regulate social interaction, to status negotiations, and, moreover, to prevent dangerous scales of conflict, therefore making the very sense of community possible, in the absence of formal political (state) institutions. This sort of huge precincts were indeed more “preventive” then “defensive”; they were in same way or another, “monuments”, focal points of communal life.
Most of the history of mankind, between the archaic so-called Palaeolithic and the historical, recent, state, has something to do with this emergence and central importance of architecture. “Material culture” (an ambiguous expression) and the other aspects of “culture” were about one main thing: the “autopoiesis” of society. Architecture was and is semiotic and utilitarian at the same time. The study and valorization of its old “remains” in modern landscape is part and parcel of our reflexive contemporary times.
On the other hand, one we look at the prehistoric past, we should discard the “current trinity” of settlements (the places of the living) / cemeteries (the places of the dead) / ritual sites (the places for the pray of living humans). Think for instance in the case of Orkney islands: their prehistoric monuments have been currently classified according to this simplistic, functionalist, common sense typology: houses / villages; burial / passage graves monuments; ritual precincts (stone rings, etc.). We do not believe in it anymore…
So, I – in the name of a team – I am calling attention to the fact that these particular kinds of sites that we study – in Portugal, but also all over Europe - are public resources, and they should be places not only used as locals for tourist gaze but also new “loci” of shared experiences. To say it in a different way: they should be commodified as a plural value, including the scientific, research side of it.
As long as our project is concerned, we are trying to join, in turn of this particular kind of sites, contemporary know-how from the broadest disciplinary scope possible: performance, staging, dwelling, museum and heritage studies, etc, etc. We would appreciate that an increasing number of people felt implied in this. We declare open to collaboration, because in our times value depends on the circulation and exchange of ideas, not in the retaining of information for a future author’s masterpiece. In this, we are as much just included in the mood of postmodernist times as anyone else.
Our approach is a sort of phenomenological oriented view, indeed, but not just a theoretical/speculative one - to the contrary, the idea is the production of knowledge able to unify Tim Ingold’s (together with Philippe Descola, one of the most interesting anthropologists and thinkers of present time) four A’s: “architecture”, “anthropology”, “archaeology” and “art”.