Actions in time: after the breakage of pottery and before the construction of walls at the site of Castelo Velho de Freixo de Numão

Abstract

This article is about an enclosure that would normally be defined by its walls. There are many other sites like this in the Iberian Peninsula. Traditional accounts would interpret this site as a fortified settlement, although the excavation director Susana Oliveira Jorge has written in more ritual terms of a monumentalised hill. However, there is another issue, and it underlies and forges the construction of both of these accounts, they are constituted through the spatial. The spatial distributions of ‘architectural’ and ‘material culture’ elements are key to these understandings. But what of their temporal dimensions? The enclosing walls of Castelo Velho are a complicated maze of different construction projects that rarely crystallise into clear static forms, and appear to be as much material practice as architecture. Fragments of pottery, as well as slabs of stone, make up these entwined structures and because of this I used the pottery to get at space in a different way. In particular, I have utilised the temporal qualities inherent in assemblages of potsherds in order to understand the temporality of the entanglement of walls. Pots, like walls, are not frozen objects but have extended histories and if you locate these alongside the extended histories of buildings you get an overlap. It is this overlap that adds an extra temporal complexity that enhances the understanding of the site. In this article, I consider the significance of this temporal trajectory, and how it reconfigures accounts of the making and unmaking of space in the Chalcolithic