Portugal Perdigões Student Diaries 3

Picture yourself at the center of the prehistoric world - in a place that might have been a space for socialization, connection to the sacred, where the human body was treated in surprising and diversified ways. Perdigões is 16-hectare site with many concentric ditched enclosures built and inhabited for about 1,500 years, between 3400 and 2000 B.C. It lies in a natural amphitheater, open to the East, with entrances aligned to the rising sun at summer and winter solstices. The site was first identified in the 1980’s and has been the subject of continuous research since 1998. It is one the most important sites in the Iberian Peninsula for research about the development of social complexity in Neolithic Europe. Our research questions are aimed at better understanding the chronology of this complex site and characterizing the associated social practices, namely the structured depositions in pits and ditches, funerary practices, social interaction, and patterns of mobility. These are investigated using a multidisciplinary approach, congregating methods from bioanthropology, archaeometry, isotopic studies, zooarchaeology, geophysics, and archaeological studies of material culture and architecture.
The 2019 research/fieldwork goals are to excavate positive and negative structures (funerary and non-funerary), ideally in the central area of Perdigões where we will likely find abundant faunal, archaeological, and human remains. In addition to excavation methods, students will learn register techniques applied to human remains and cleaning and identifying human bones as well as methods for estimation of age at death, sex diagnosis, and minimum number of recovered individuals.