Pipas (Reguengos de Monsaraz, Évora): an open‑ air site at the beginnings of the Middle Neolithic of southern Portugal

Abstract

We are presenting the results of the rescue excavation carried out in 2000, in the early Middle Neolithic settlement of Pipas, located on the right bank of the middle Guadiana basin and currently submerged by the waters of the Alqueva dam.

With a single, tenuous layer of occupation revealing brief stay(s) and disinvestment in the domestic space, the interpretation of the site resorts to comparison with housing and funerary contexts, dating from the last quarter of the 5th and the first half of the 4th millennia cal BC, when protomegalithic tombs emerged, referring to the first graves built with stone for the preservation of memory. These graves are still far from the scale that megalithic architecture would pursue in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, reaching the paroxysm of monumentalization in the last quarter of the same millennium.

We propose, for the regional Middle Neolithic, an economic model of pastoralism and itinerant agriculture, carried out in thin and light soils whose natural fertility would be quickly depleted, forcing the frequent relocation of the villages, with flimsy domestic structures, which quickly faded into the landscape.