Instrumentos líticos para a deformação plástica de metais do povoado calcolítico de Outeiro Redondo (Sesimbra)

Excavations undertaken at the fortified Chalcolithic settlement of Outeiro Redondo between 2005 and 2016 produced an assemblage of eight stone implements likely used in the plastic deformation of metals. All implements come from clearly defined contexts of the Middle / Late Chalcolithic, within a sector of the site that has also produced copious other evidence for metallurgical activities. Drawing on archaeological and ethnografic comparisons, we discuss the choice of raw material and the morphology of these implements in terms of their manufacture, as well as their role in the operational sequence of Chalcolithic metalwork prodution. We also consider their potencial to inform inferences concerning the social division of labour in Chalcolithic society.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Provenance, Use and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age: The state of debate

Bronze is the defining metal of the European Bronze Age and has been at the center of archaeological and science-based research for well over a century. Archaeometallurgical studies have largely focused on determining the geological origin of the constituent metals, copper and tin, and their movement from producer to consumer sites. More recently, the effects of recycling, both temporal and spatial, on the composition of the circulating metal stock have received much attention. Also, discussions of the value and perception of bronze, both as individual objects and as hoarded material, continue to be the focus of scholarly debate. Here, we bring together the sometimes diverging views of several research groups on these topics in an attempt to find common ground and set out the major directions of the debate, for the benefit of future research. The paper discusses in turn issues of: geological provenance of new metal entering the system and how to determine and interpret it; the circulation of extant metal across time and space, and how this is seen in changing compositional signatures; and some economic aspects of metal production. These include the role of metal-producing communities within larger economic settings, quantifying the amount of metal present at any one time within a society, and aspects of hoarding, a distinctive European phenomenon that is less prevalent in the Middle Eastern and Asian Bronze Age societies.Funded by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Researc

The Argaric Settlement at Las Herrerias (Cuevas de Almanzora, Almeria), based on unpublished L. Siret's Notes

During the first decades of this century, L. Siret documented a series of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age remains at Las Herrerías that were discovered (and subsequently destroyed) by mining operations of the time. Today his notes constitute the only evidence for what once must have been a fairly rich archaeological locality. Based on Siret's notes and the few finds he managed to rescue, we can reconstruct it as an open and rather dispersed, though certainly large, settlement that lacks the tightly knit, nuclear structure with almost urban features displayed by most other known Argaric habitation sites. The haphazard and unsystematic way in which Siret documented the funerary remains, and in which he and later authors published them, has led to some confusion about the actual composition of the assemblages and about their relative and absolute chronology. Also contributing to this confusion was a mixing of materials from two of the graves that occurred in the 1950s, after the finds had been deposited in the National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid. The present contribution seeks to give a systematic account of the site based on Siret's notes and the surviving finds in order to sort out these problems and to call special attention to the coastal settlements of the El Argar Culture, which have been hitherto largely ignored by archaeologists and which are currently endangered by a variety of natural factor s and human actions.En Las Herrerías L. Siret documentó durante el curso de labores de minería en las primeras décadas de nuestro siglo restos de tumbas y viviendas tanto del Calcolítico como de la Edad del Bronce. Sus escasas notas son hoy día los únicos testimonios de la ocupación prehistórica del lugar, privado en la actualidad de todo su anterior potencial arqueológico por la destrucción producida por las actividades industriales del siglo XIX y de la primera mitad del siglo XX. A partir de sus notas y de los pocos hallazgos rescatados por él, se puede reconstruir para la Edad del Bronce un poblamiento aparentemente importante pero sin un núcleo de características urbanas, estructurado más bien de manera abierta y dispersa. El modo aislado y poco sistemático como el propio Siret y varios autores posteriores fueron dando a conocer distintos datos sobre los conjuntos funerarios de Las Herrerías, así como la mezcla de materiales de dos de las tumbas durante los años cincuenta, cuando ya habían ingresados en el Museo Arqueológico Nacional, ha creado cierta confusión con respecto a los ajuares respectivos y su cronología relativa y absoluta. El presente artículo pretende ofrecer una sinopsis sistemática de los materiales conservados y de la información recogida en las notas de L. Siret, para corregir estos errores y llamar la atención sobre los asentamientos litorales de la cultura argárica en general, categoría de poblados muy amenazados por la acción tanto de la naturaleza como del hombre y generalmente infravalorados por la investigación