Evocative Monuments in the Late 3rd Millennium BC

Reassessing Depositional Practices beyond Funerary and Domestic Realms

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6094492
AutoresAntonio Blanco-González (0000-0003-4502-9651, Durham University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen47
Número1
Páginas1-17
Fecha de publicación2014-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNorwegian Archaeological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0029-3652 • E-ISSN: 1502-7678
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00293652.2014.897749
OpenAlexW2059597580
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas25

This paper challenges customary archaeological accounts of non-megalithic tumuli during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Because of their wide range of regional and chronological variability across Atlantic Europe, rigid interpretative templates based on restrictive Western concepts such as ‘domestic’ or ‘funerary’ become inadequate. The analysis of several well-documented case studies in the Central Meseta (Iberia) through a programme of fieldwork prompts reconsideration of some uncontested assumptions extrapolated from research on megaliths and funerary contexts associated with Bell Beaker pottery. Some of these constructions lack actual layering or clear structures, their material assemblages are scarce, scattered and highly fragmented – including everyday residues and partial Beakers – and luxury items or human remains are barely recovered from them. The article discusses these peculiarities and confusing contents, commonly regarded as being the result of post-abandonment disturbance. A taphonomic assessment of their cultural debris attentive to formation processes and a comparison among depositional contexts within their local settings allow reappraisal of these constructions other than simply as areas of occupation or looted burials. Some of them could be better understood in terms of complementariness and mutual reference, as being the outcome of evocative practices that, through quotation and emulation, linked together absent places, beings and episodes

Abandonment (legal) · Ancient history · Archaeology · Beaker · Bronze Age · Chalcolithic · Geography · Grave goods · JAR · Megalith · Pottery · Taphonomy · Archaeological and Geological Studies · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology