Abstract
Abstract Funerary usage of Galeria da Cisterna (Almonda) and Gruta do Caldeirão began at the onset of the Neolithic and continued until Early Medieval times. At Cisterna, the thin Holocene deposit was unstratified; at Caldeirão, the stratigraphic sequence underwent post-depositional disturbance. Using radiocarbon dating, typological considerations, spatial distribution patterns, and physical anthropological data, these palimpsests can be disentangled to a significant extent. At both sites, the earliest depositions fall in the c. 5250–5500 cal BC interval and are associated with large numbers of beads. Wares extensively decorated with shell and comb impressions are likely to belong in this phase. Another style of decoration – shell impressions forming bands below the rim and garlands between prehension knobs – probably dates to a slightly later time. Burial continued at both sites through the c. 5000–5250 cal BC time range, but which decorative styles were then in fashion remains difficult to ascertain; it is likely that the irregular arrangements of shell impressions seen in some Cisterna vessels are among them. At Caldeirão, non-Cardial impressed and incised wares date to c. 4500–5000 cal BC, while undecorated wares are associated with human bone samples demonstrating two different periods of burial during the c. 3500–4000 cal BC interval. Most if not all of the nine Cardial individuals directly dated at the two sites died coevally with the more recent of the Mesolithic interments found in the shell-midden sites of the Tagus estuary.
Highlights
The Cardial culture is the archaeological proxy for early farming in the western Mediterranean
Jean Guilaine’s review of museum collections showed that this culture had reached as far as Iberia’s Atlantic façade; the proof came from vessels or sherds bearing the diagnostic decoration that Guilaine was able to identify among the finds made at a number of Portuguese cave and open-air sites excavated in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth (Guilaine & Veiga Ferreira, 1970)
The age of the other four individuals represented by the dated remains illustrated in Figure 2b is consistent with assignment to either the Classic Cardial or the Late Cardial
Summary
The Cardial culture is the archaeological proxy for early farming in the western Mediterranean. A hiatus in sedimentation followed, and so it was atop a Pleistocene cave floor that people of the Cardial culture deposed the bodies of their dead These funerary contexts were dispersed by processes of syn- and post-depositional disturbance. The post-depositional disturbance of this context scattered it onto the Corridor (squares K-O/13-18), where elements thereof were found in layer Eb, mixed with likewise-intruded human remains and undecorated ceramics representing funerary usage of this part of the cave during the Middle Neolithic. It was possible to partially reconstruct, from finds retrieved in layer ABCD or at its disturbed interface with underlying units, two other Caldeirão find horizons: Late Neolithic and Copper Age. Note that four green rock (muscovite and variscite) beads previously assigned to horizon NA1
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