university of texas press heraldry for the dead memory identity and the engraved stone plaques of neolithic iberia sep 2008

heraldry for the dead
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heraldry for the dead
Memory, Identity, and the
Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia
katina t. lillios
university of texas press
Austin
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 is book has been supported by an endowment dedicated to classics and
the ancient world and funded by the Areté Foundation; the Gladys Krieble
Delmas Foundation; the Dougherty Foundation; the James R. Dougherty, Jr.
Foundation; the Rachael and Ben Vaughan Foundation; and the National
Endowment for the Humanities.  e endowment has also benefi ted from gifts
by Mark and Jo Ann Finley, Lucy Shoe Meritt, the late Anne Byrd Nalle,
and other individual donors.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lillios, Katina T., 1960–
Heraldry for the dead : memory, identity, and the engraved stone plaques
of neolithic Iberia / Katina T. Lillios. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 978-0-292-71822-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Neolithic period—Iberian Peninsula. 2. Plaques, plaquettes—Iberian Peninsula.
3. Burial—Iberian Peninsula. 4. Antiquities, Prehistoric—Iberian Peninsula.
5. Iberian Peninsula—Antiquities. I. Title.
.. 2008
936.6—dc22
2008017086
00-T4718-FM-AJ1.indd iv00-T4718-FM-AJ1.indd iv 6/17/08 7:02:12 AM6/17/08 7:02:12 AM
For Morten, who nourished, for Rasmus, who clarifi ed, and for my
father, who accepted. And for my mother, who did not live to see
its completion, but who believed.
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contents
 ix
 
.  
.  
.  
.    
.     
.       
 
 

  


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acknowledgments
That a manuscript on the engraved plaques
of Iberia now faces me is a mystery almost as perplexing as the engraved plaques
themselves.  ree major sources of assistance and inspiration deserve my heartfelt
thanks: fi rst, the museums, granting agencies, and educational institutions that
provided generous fi nancial and institutional support; second, my colleagues and
students, who took part in countless conversations, discussions, and exchanges
about ideas developed in this book; and third, my intellectual “ancestors”—former
teachers and advisors.
 e Archaeological Institute of America awarded me an Archaeology of Portu-
gal Grant in 2003 that allowed me to study and photograph hundreds of plaques
found in the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, the Museu do Carmo, and the Mu-
seu Geológico in Lisbon. In 2004 I received an Arts and Humanities Initiative
grant from the University of Iowa, which funded the technical support that helped
produce and ultimately launch the electronic database of the plaques: the Engraved
Stone Plaque Registry and Inquiry Tool (ESPRIT). ESPRIT constitutes the empirical
basis for the ideas in this work.  e University of Iowa Offi ce of the Vice President
for Research provided support for the preparation of this manuscript.
 e actual creation of ESPRIT required a level of collaboration, generosity, and
collegiality that I fi nd both overwhelming and humbling. I owe many people many
thanks. First I must thank my archaeology students from Ripon College, espe-
cially Andrew Rich, who helped me photocopy and catalogue hundreds of plaques
on index cards in 2001. Little did they (or I) know where their eff orts would lead.
 e present state of ESPRIT, with records and images of over 1,300 plaques, is the
result of being granted access to and being able to photograph and/or reproduce

hundreds of plaques found in museums throughout Portugal and Spain. I wish to
express my deepest gratitude to the many curators and archaeologists who allowed
me to study the plaques in their holdings or to study and photograph plaques from
their excavations.  ey include Dr. Luís Raposo, director of the Museu Nacio-
nal de Arqueologia (Lisbon); Dr. José Brandão, curator of the Museu Geológico
(Lisbon); Dr. Guillermo S. Kurtz Schaefer, director of the Museo Arqueológico
Provincial de Badajoz (Badajoz); Dra. Carmen Cacho, curator at the Museo Ar-
queológico Nacional (Madrid); Dr. José Arnaud, director of the Museu do Carmo
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
x
(Lisbon); Dr. António Carrilho, curator of the Museu Municipal de Lagos (Lagos);
Dr. Diego Oliva Alonso, curator of the Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla (Seville);
Drs. Miguel Lago and António Valera of Era-Arqueologia, S.A. (Lisbon); and
Dr. Rui Parreira of Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico (IPPAR,
Faro). I am also grateful to many archaeologists who granted permission to repro-
duce images of plaques from their publications in ESPRIT: Dr. António Carlos
Silva (IPPAR, Évora), Dr. João Cardoso (Universidade Aberta, Lisbon), Dr. Víc-
tor Hurtado Pérez (Universidad de Sevilla), Dra. Raquel Vilaça (Universidade de
Coimbra), Dr. Lars Larsson (University of Lund), Dr. Manuel Calado (Univer-
sidade de Lisboa), Dr. João Ludgero Gonçalves (Museu Municipal de Cadaval),
Dra. Primitiva Bueno Ramírez (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares), and Dr. Victor
Gonçalves (Universidade de Lisboa). I owe special thanks to Dr. Dirce Marzoli,
director of the German Archaeological Institute, Madrid, for graciously allowing
me to reproduce many illustrations from the Leisners’ publications.
I am also profoundly grateful for all the technical assistance over the years that
ultimately made ESPRIT a reality. Jean Moore, Monika Pawlak, Angela Collins,
and Meredith Anderson helped scan and prepare the plaque images for use in ES-
PRIT. Angela Collins also prepared some of the maps in this book. Stephanie Ser-
lin and María Mercedes Ortiz Rodríguez translated German passages from the

Leisners’ publications. Sally Donohue helped set up the original Filemaker Pro ver-
sion of ESPRIT. For the spatial analyses I carried out on the plaques, I am indebted
to Jerry Mount (University of Iowa, Department of Geography). Michael Chibnik,
my colleague at the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, generously
off ered advice on the statistical analyses that were conducted by UI graduate stu-
dent Erica Begun. I owe huge thanks to the Academic Technologies team at the
University of Iowa: Steven Bowers, Danny Novo, and especially Denny Crall—for
bringing ESPRIT to life on the World Wide Web.
I wish also to thank those colleagues and friends who provided encouragement
throughout this project’s genesis, off ered critical insights on ideas and methods, or
pointed out useful bibliographic materials: Ana Cristina Araújo, Bettina Arnold,
Paul Axelrod, Douglass Bailey, Elizabeth Barber, Nanette Barkey, Rui Boaventura,
Primitiva Bueno Ramírez, Donald Crowe, James Enloe, Lothar von Falkenhausen,
Antonio Gilman, Billy Graves, Elisa Guerra-Doce, Richard J. Harrison, Adi Hast-
ings, Paulo Heitlinger, Michael Herzfeld, Petya Hristova, Andy Jones, Evelyn
Kain, Meena Khandelwal, Michael Kunst, Ana Cristina Martins, Lynn Meskell,
Heather Miller, Teresa Orozco Köhler, Brent Peterson, Jeff rey Quilter, Caroline
Read, James Sackett, Frank Salomon, Barbara Sässe, John Steinberg, Tom Wake,
Birgit Wegemann, Estella Weiss-Krejci, and João Zilhão. I am especially grateful
to those colleagues who read drafts of chapters of this book and off ered helpful
suggestions:  omas Charlton, Margarita Díaz-Andreu, Leonardo García San-
juán, Mary Helms, and Robin Skeates.  e reviewers of this manuscript, Javier
Urcid and John Papadopoulos, provided extraordinarily detailed suggestions and
corrections to this text, which I have done my best to address.  e editorial staff of
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
xi
the University of Texas Press, particularly Jim Burr, Lynne Chapman, and Kathy
Lewis, provided steady encouragement during this book’s gestation and did a tre-
mendous job to improve the clarity and consistency of my writing. Needless to say,

I assume full responsibility for any errors that remain.
Many of my students at the University of Iowa have also traveled with me on
this journey, and I appreciate all their help and intellectual insights along the way:
Erica Begun, Grant McCall, Alexander Woods, and Jonathan  omas.
At some point in writing this book, it occurred to me that its interdisciplinary
content was in large part a product of my own undergraduate and graduate educa-
tion, particularly my graduate training at Yale University. At Yale I was encouraged
to read broadly and deeply, not only within anthropology but also in other disci-
plines. My intellectual peregrinations took me to the Departments of Forestry and
Environmental Studies, History of Art, and Geology and Geophysics—as well as
to diverse anthropology classes. For that privilege, I especially wish to acknowledge
Professors Harold Conklin, Michael Dietler, Robert Gordon, Frank Hole, Andrew
Moore, Jerome J. Pollitt, Garth Voigt (now deceased), and Timothy Weiskel.
Finally, I owe special gratitude to my husband, Morten Schlütter, and our son,
Rasmus. I am blessed by their love, patience, good humor—and indeed their (now)
shared appreciation of these tantalizing objects.
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heraldry for the dead
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introduction
The engraved stone plaques of prehistoric
Iberia are mind traps.  eir hypnotically repetitive designs, the eyes that stare out
from some of them, and their compositional standardization have intrigued pre-
historians for over a century (Figure I.1).

Discovered in hundreds of Late Neolithic (3500–2000 BC) burials through-
out southwest Iberia (Figure I.2),


the engraved plaques have enjoyed an enduring
place in the scholarly imagination.  e nineteenth-century Portuguese medical
doctor Augusto Filippe Simões (1878:53) wondered whether they might be “amulets
or insignias or emblems or cult objects.”

After the eminent Portuguese geologist
Carlos Ribeiro showed Florentino Ameghino, the Argentine naturalist, some of the
plaques at the Paris Exposition in 1878, Ameghino (1879:219) speculated that they
represented “a complete system of ideographic writing that awaits decipherment
and obscures facts of great importance.”

 e Portuguese prehistorian Vergílio
Correia (1917:30) argued that the plaques are “what they simply are—idols or icons
of prehistoric divinities.”

 e Polish ethnologist Eugeniusz Frankowski (1920:23)
believed that the plaques were not idols or divinities but representations of the
dead. To the Portuguese archaeologist Victor dos Santos Gonçalves (1999a:114), the
plaques unquestionably depict the European Mother Goddess.
For nearly twenty years I found the palm-sized plaques easy to ignore.  eir
subtly engraved lines and their dark gray color hardly called out for attention,
particularly when they were displayed in dimly lit museum cases. When the oc-
casional plaque did catch my eye I would, I confess, experience a brief fl icker of
curiosity. I recall one such moment in the summer of 1994 at the Museu Municipal
de Montemor-o-Novo, a small provincial museum in the Alentejo region of south-
ern Portugal. I was visiting the museum with my geologist collaborator Howard
Snyder to examine the stone tools in its collection as part of our study of trade dur-
ing the Late Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula. We were particularly interested in
stone tools made of amphibolite, a dark greenish-black metamorphic rock found in
this region of Portugal. After noticing a group of engraved plaques displayed next

to some amphibolite tools in the museum, we casually remarked that the plaques
and the stone tools resembled each other in color, form, and size. Howard even
suggested that the plaques’ artists had represented the crystalline microstructure
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figure i.1.
Plaque from Olival da Pega (Évora, Portugal). Photograph by author,
courtesy of Museu Nacional de Arqueologia.
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
3
of amphibolite in the geometric designs of the plaques.  e hot Alentejo sun and
hundreds of hours spent peering down a microscope at stone tools had clearly got-
ten to him. Howard needed a day at the beach, and I did not see myself as an “art
and symbolism” person.
All this changed, however, in the winter of . My colleague Jonathan Haws
had kindly mailed me a new book, Reguengos de Monsaraz: Territórios megalíticos
(Gonçalves a), summarizing Gonçalves’ thinking about the archaeology of the
Reguengos de Monsaraz region, the heartland of amphibolite and of the engraved
slate plaques.  e book sat unopened on my offi ce bookshelf for a few weeks, un-
til I had time one evening to look at it. Casually thumbing through the book, I
saw familiar images—plans of megaliths, site distribution maps, and photographs
of undecorated handmade Neolithic pottery. My calm was disrupted, however,
when I reached the full-page color photographs of the engraved plaques. Nestled
in my warm and cozy offi ce in Ripon, Wisconsin, while arctic winds howled out-
side, I was stunned to see the individual incisions and delicate cross-hatchings
that fi lled the designs. For the fi rst time, I noticed the abrasions and scratches and
the grooves in the plaques’ perforations left by their original drilling. I could see
where engravers had made mistakes and where they had corrected them. I could
identify plaques engraved in the same idiosyncratic style and possibly produced by
 ..

Region in southwest Iberia in which engraved plaques have been found.
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
4
the same engraver. I saw beautiful plaques and strange plaques. And for the fi rst
time the plaques spoke to me. While , years separate us from the world of
Late Neolithic Iberians, there is something palpably accessible about the engraved
plaques—at least under good light. I was hooked.
Ultimately I was inspired to write this book.  is is a book about many things.
It is above all about seeing, about seeing with new eyes, and, most importantly,
about seeing with multiple eyes. Writing the book has been—and I hope reading
it will be—a visually, intellectually, and emotionally stimulating exercise in ap-
prehending a body of material culture through a diverse array of theoretical lenses.
 roughout it, I engage a range of epistemologies and methodologies in regard to
the engraved plaques—critical historiography, formal analyses, experimental stud-
ies, spatial analyses, and interpretative frameworks inspired by memory and vi-
sual culture studies.  is study seeks to engage with what Michael Herzfeld ()
has called the “militant middle ground” in anthropology, in which structure and
agency, materialism and idealism, and humanism and scientism occupy a shared
intellectual space.  us this book does not seek to contain the plaques in a seam-
less explanatory package.  eories, I believe, should be tools that generate new
questions, provoke new insights, and organize information.  ey are not intellec-
tual straightjackets. Many questions will remain unanswered, ambiguities will be
identifi ed, and contradictions will be teased out. One of my intentions is that this
book, as well as the perspectives that it draws upon, will stimulate new pathways
of inquiry. While this may be the fi rst book dedicated to the Iberian plaques, I cer-
tainly hope it will not be the last.
Although the Iberian plaques have been known for over a century and have been
interpreted in a variety of ways, most theories about the plaques have been fi rmly
lodged in idealism, an approach that seeks to explain human behavior and material

culture through people’s shared values, beliefs, or religious practices (Aunger ).
 e engraved plaques are found in burials and are decorated, which has led most
archaeologists to apply idealist models that center on the religious practices and
artistic traditions of prehistoric Iberians. While many intriguing questions within
this framework have been proposed (such as what the plaques may have depicted),
many aspects of the plaques, particularly their material and social dimensions,
have remained unaddressed. How were the plaques made? How long did it take
to make one? Where were they made? How was their production and distribution
organized? Were they the work of specialized artisans? Were they worn or used
during a person’s life or were they made at the time of a person’s death? Are there
meaningful patterns in their design? Are diff erent plaque types found in diff erent
regions? How did making and using the plaques structure the lives of ancient Ibe-
rians? Why, indeed, were they made at all?
 is is also a book about identity and, specifi cally, the creation of identities dur-
ing a critical juncture in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. In this book I take
identity to be a “relational and sociocultural phenomenon that emerges and circu-
lates in local discourse contexts of interaction rather than a stable structure located
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
5
primarily in the individual psyche or in fi xed social categories” (Bucholtz and Hall
:–). In other words, identity is not inherent in individuals or groups but
is the product of engagement, interaction, and ultimately the “social positioning of
the self and other” (ibid.:).
During the Late Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula powerful economic and
social forces structured the creation of new identities. Human populations were
increasingly tethered to a residential base, an outcome of their intensifi cation
of agricultural production. At the same time when this residential stability was
emerging, however, we also see evidence for increased long-distance travel (at least
as experienced by some individuals and groups) to acquire important raw materi-

als from the Alentejo, such as amphibolite for axes and adzes, variscite for beads,
and copper for tools and weapons. I suggest that the polarization of experiences
and knowledge, diff erentiating those who traveled from those who stayed closer to
home, crystallized in new social identities. I also argue that the encounters of those
traders and travelers on the open plains of the Alentejo—coming from diverse re-
gions of the peninsula, perhaps speaking diff erent (mutually unintelligible?) dia-
lects, and competing for the valued resources of the Alentejo—further contributed
to the emergence and materialization of social distinctions.
 e social landscape of the Late Neolithic, such as it was, also would have in-
stigated profound changes in mnemonic practices in order for groups to maintain
and legitimate rights to these economic and symbolic resources far from their resi-
dential bases. In fact, the material record of the Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula
suggests that such transformations occurred—in the reuse of sacred objects, the
circulation of the remains of the dead, the mimesis of ancestral landscapes, and
the rituals that brought the living and dead together in liminal spaces that both
ordered and transcended time, by mobilizing “deep time” (Boric ).
 us this book is also about memory and about how people construct their
pasts. While memory studies are very much in vogue in academic circles, includ-
ing archaeology (Herzfeld ; Van Dyke and Alcock ; Williams ),
few archaeologists were concerned with memory when I fi rst began thinking seri-
ously about the plaques. But, in the delicately controlled lines and hatching of a
plaque that so exquisitely preserve the careful handiwork of a person living ,
years ago, one cannot help experiencing, on an intimate level, a sense of shared
humanity. As part and parcel of recognizing that humanity comes an awareness
that people of the past had their own pasts and their own stories about how they
came to be, where they came from, and who they were related to. Once I began to
consider these dimensions of Neolithic lifeways, through the material qualities of
the plaques, I could begin to ask new questions about the plaques and ultimately
contemplate the possibility that they were memory aids, heraldry for the dead,


and indeed writing.
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
themes
Ever since antiquarians began discover-
ing the engraved plaques in the nineteenth century, they have emphasized their
homogeneity. Indeed, the plaques are remarkably coherent in their form and de-
sign.  e Portuguese prehistorian Vergílio Correia (:) noted this nearly a
hundred years ago, when he explained that relatively few plaques were published
because they were so similar to one another. However, most archaeologists prob-
ably highlighted their similarity because they believed that the plaques were part
of a singular ideological phenomenon. As I discuss later in this chapter, archaeolo-
gists had long thought the Iberian Peninsula was colonized in the Late Neolithic
by people from the eastern Mediterranean who came in search of metals and who
brought their belief in a Mother Goddess religion with them. Although modern
dating systems do not support such an interpretation (nor are there any objects of
east Mediterranean origin dating to this period in the Iberian Peninsula), the no-
tion of a Mother Goddess has left a deep impression on the archaeological scholar-
ship of the Iberian Peninsula.
In this chapter I begin by summarizing what we know about the Iberian Pen-
insula prior to the period of the engraved plaques as well as the social and po-
litical landscape of the peninsula during their use. Material culture helps us to
understand the social and cultural behavior of ancient populations, but the social
landscape of an ancient group of people constrains, shapes, and ultimately gives
meaning to that material culture. I then review the principal characteristics of the
plaques’ formal and design features and outline their general similarities. Finally, I
provide an overview of previous scholarship on the plaques.
the cultural setting

Beginning in the sixth millennium BC, during the period known as the Early
Neolithic, human groups living on the Iberian Peninsula underwent a series of
social and economic transformations stimulated by the introduction of plant and
animal domesticates (Gilman and  ornes ; Chapman ; Arias ; Bern-
abeu Aubán and Orozco Köhler ; Jorge ; Kunst ) and marked ar-
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
8
chaeologically in some regions by the appearance of cardial shell–decorated ceram-
ics.

Whether these transformations occurred as a result of colonization by peoples
who traveled along the Mediterranean coast, the trade of foodstuff s without popu-
lation movement, or some combination of these processes is vigorously debated
(Zilhão , ; Jackes et al. ; Richards ; Peña-Chocarro et al. ).
 e speed of the uptake of domesticates is also disputed. Some scholars envision
a long and gradual integration of domesticates by hunting and foraging peoples,
lasting around , years. João Zilhão (), however, has argued that, if only
radiocarbon dates on short-life samples for Early Neolithic sites are taken into ac-
count, this uptake actually took no more than six generations and thus was a fairly
rapid process.
Although the precise dates are still unclear, it appears that some centuries af-
ter the appearance of domesticates human groups began to construct megalithic
tombs to house their dead (Leisner and Leisner , , , ; Leisner ,
) (Figure .). As in earlier periods, they also used caves and rockshelters. Some
of the earliest of these megalithic burials, such as Poço da Gateira (Évora), were
individual inhumations without engraved plaques.
Although animal herding and agriculture were practiced in many enclaves of
the peninsula during the Early Neolithic, particularly in those landscapes not oc-
cupied by hunters and foragers, it was not until the Late Neolithic that a fully agri-

cultural and sedentary lifestyle was more fi rmly established. It was also at this time
that the fi rst engraved plaques were made, with the earliest dates for the plaques
occurring between  and  BC (Gonçalves a:).
 ..
Megalithic tomb of Gorafe (Granada, Spain). Photograph courtesy of Leonardo García Sanjuán.
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
9
During the Late Neolithic (– BC) human communities farmed wheat
and barley and supplemented their agricultural base by herding sheep, goat, cat-
tle, and pigs.  ey also hunted wild game (such as boar and deer), gathered wild
plants and plant products (such as acorns), fi shed, and collected shellfi sh, particu-
larly along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.  ey made their homes in caves,
rockshelters, and open-air settlements, especially on hilltops at the confl uence of
rivers. Some of these hilltop settlements were walled and had circular/semicircular
towers or bastions built into their walls (Cardoso ).  ese sites include Zam-
bujal (Sangmeister and Schubart ) (Figure .) and Leceia in Portugal (Cardoso
) and Almizaraque (Delibes et al. ), Los Millares (Molina and Arribas
), and Terrera Ventura (Gusi ) in Spain.
Most settlements were about  ha, with population estimates ranging from a
dozen to over a thousand individuals.  ere are larger sites, however, such as Los
Millares ( ha), and some exceptionally large sites, many along the Guadiana River
on the border between present-day Portugal and Spain.  ese include Perdigões in
Portugal ( ha) (Lago et al. ), San Blas in Spain ( ha) (Hurtado Pérez ),
Ferreira do Alentejo in Portugal ( ha) (Arnaud ), La Pijotilla in Spain (
ha) (Hurtado Pérez ), and the largest yet known, Marroquíes Bajos in Spain
 ..
Zambujal (Lisbon, Portugal). Photograph by Michael Kunst, courtesy of German
Archaeological Institute, Madrid.
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
10
( ha) (Zafra et al. ). Pedro Díaz-del-Río () hypothesized that the size
diff erences among these sites might be explained by their diff erent histories of fu-
sion/fi ssion cycles so characteristic of segmentary societies. Other scholars, such as
Susana Oliveira Jorge () and José Enrique Márquez Romero (), have ques-
tioned the monolithic designation of these sites as settlements.  ey suggest that
the symbolic and phenomenological qualities of these sites should be addressed,
such as how they structured vision and visibility, constrained human actions, and
delimited space.
As with Early Neolithic populations, Later Neolithic peoples in the Iberian
Peninsula buried their dead collectively in caves and rockshelters.  ey also began
to house their dead in rock-cut tombs, corbel-vaulted tombs (tholoi), and passage
graves (Figure .). Hundreds of these tombs dot the Portuguese and Spanish coun-
tryside, though their largest concentrations are in the northwestern and southern
regions of the peninsula. Some areas are so densely fi lled with these tombs—such
as the Alentejo province of southern Portugal—that archaeologists have tradition-
 ..
Megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula. a,  olos tomb of La Pijotilla (Badajoz, Spain).
b, Passage grave of Cueva de La Pastora (Sevilla, Spain).
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