Resumo
The current image “in ruins” of most of the megaliths has been the main reason why it has traditionally been interpreted that most of them were abandoned, rejecting the possibility of recording archeographically many archaeological events. This is the case of the closure practices, which have been absent in the peninsular bibliography until a few years ago.In this paper, we will examine the variability of this type of events throughout the chronological interval analyzed (IVth-IInd millennium cal. BC), in order to observe and evaluate the changes in the closing resources chosen along the time. Despite this diversity, the archaeological record of this “uses” is not difficult because these activities are intentional and are developed, not in a chaotic way, but according to a patterned strategy.Thanks to the singularity of these practices, it is possible to get good samples for radiocarbon dating from these kind of contexts. Their chronological characterization, through the application of diferent Bayesian analysis (the corpus of data of this work is composed by more than thirty dates), has allowed us to study the continuity and discontinuity of this phenomenon, represented throughout all the time interval. The results point to the existence of two specific moments (the first one, along the first centuries of the IVth millennium cal.BC, and the second one, between the end of the IVth and the beginning of the IIIrd millennium cal. BC), in which the users of the megaliths decided to seal them definitively. These two episodes are characterized by the implementation of different closing resources, so that the most of the practices of “closing fire” and “tumulation” are gathered in the oldest moments of the sequence as long as in more recent phases the complete sealing of the interior accesses with soil and stones was more usual.
Palabras chave
Megalithism. Closure practices. Temporality. Bayesian statistics. Douro Basin.