Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro

If you've listened to our most recent podcast, episode number The Chalcolithic then you've heard me talk a bit about the Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro. Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro is a Portuguese Chalcolithic settlement located near Azambuja that dates back to 2600 BC - 1300 BC. Most of our recent posts have been about prehistoric structures and technically the settlement would qualify as that. But, to make things simpler for me to divide up on the blog I've put a cutoff date of the "prehistoric" at 2800 BC. This figure is pretty arbitrary, but it's helpful for me in my head. In light of this, the Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro qualifies as an ancient post, rather than a prehistoric one - even though the people of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro were prehistoric (not writing history down). So bear with me on that point please.

Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro is culturally and chronologically linked with the Los Millares settlement in Spain, though not quite as old as their Spanish counterparts. But, they are just as fascinating. They left behind a treasure trove of artifacts for us to understand how they lived including buildings, pottery and arrowheads. Their importance though lies in them being at the forefront of megalithic construction. The people of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro started building megalithic structures almost a full thousand years earlier than their contemporaries in other parts of Europe.

There seems to have been a couple of distinct periods for the people at Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro. VNSP I were the earliest inhabitants and began to construct a fortified settlement sometime around 2700 BC. They built dolmens and menhirs in their spare time and constructed an economy based on agriculture and domesticated animals. The fact that they built walls shows the influence of Los Millares, who we said were a warlike culture. With testy neighbors like the Los Millares, it was probably a pretty good decision to build some walls. During this period the people of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro began to establish trade ties and started to shape their megalithic structures in ways that aligned to celestial happenings. Archeo-astronomers (as well as the general public) can marvel at some of these complex works. Going basically on just pure will and a eyesight they were able to build some marvelous wonders that would stand up to even today's architectural prowess.

The Arrowheads of Envy

At around 2200 BC though things started to get really interesting. The Beaker People moved into the Iberian peninsula and the inhabitants of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro adopted some of their practices. They adopted Beaker burial traditions and their pottery making skills but kept much of their earlier cultural heritage. Basically the combined Beaker death rites and ceramic making with a growing megalithic culture. This led to prolific megalithic building and pottery making. The influx of the Beaker Culture also seems to have opened up trading ties to further flung regions of Iberia and even into France. At about this time the dominating influence of Los Millares seems to have waned a bit and after about 300 years of cultural mixing all of Iberia seems to have become a bit more decentralized. While this would be bad for someone building an empire, it seems to have been really freaking good for trade. The craftsmen of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro produced artifacts that have been found as far east as Bohemia. It was about this time that their copper skills were becoming the envy of Europe. It was the copper arrowheads that made their way all throughout Western and Central Europe. Great as the Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro were, their cultural dominance couldn't last forever. Even though they retained much of their culture even after the Beaker People moved in, the decentralizing of Iberia would eventually open up the arena for another cultural explosion. This time the culture shift occurred because of the discovery and mastery of bronze. At around 1800 bronze working came into the region and slowly the Atlantic Bronze Age would begin. But the people of Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro were stubborn and held on to their culture for another 500 years before the Bronze Age finally supplanted them. The Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro seems to have fallen out of favor with people and the site was abandoned sometime around 1300 BC.

The dominating influence of Los Millares

Los Millares Now

Los Millares is located about 17 kilometers north of Almería in southern part of Spain. It is a Chalcolithic settlement that we talk about it in the Chalcolithic podcast. But, we thought it might be nice to get a few visuals to go along with information on the podcast.

Almería tourist information touts Los Millares as the most important Chalcolithic site in Europe and Europe's first Chalcolithic city. Given that it is tourist information trying to entice you to visit the region a bit of hyperbole can be expected. But, they're not too far off. The contentious point for many justifiably prideful "first claimers" is the designation city. But, that's a can of worms we won't get into.

Pottery from Los Millares, it resembles much of Beaker Culture pottery

Megalithic stones & pottery.

Regardless, Los Millares is one of the, if not the most important Chalcolithic sites in Europe because of its immense size. The five acre site has three sets of walls and fortifications with bastion like structures to defend the settlement. What makes it a Chalcolithic city is one large building within the walls that shows copper smelting activity.

The people who built Los Millares were probably an offshoot of the much larger Neolithic/Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age super archeological grouping called the Beaker Culture. Like many of the various strands of Beaker Culture they were megalithic builders, specializing in tholoi tombs.

Entrance to a tholos.

A tholos tomb (tholoi is the plural of tholos) is more commonly referred to as a Beehive tomb, but in an effort to sound more intelligent than I am I went with the Greek name. I wouldn't have attempted this on the podcast because of my trend to mispronounce words. The reason its called a beehive tomb is because it generally resembles a beehive on the inside. Outside of the walls of Los Millares are 70 or so tholoi that were once covered by port-hole slabs (a megalithic technique to cover the grave entrance with a massive stone) and contained grave goods. However, the grave goods of every tholos were not equal. This inequity has led many to claim that the Los Millares people were stratified, a key point in the evolution of society that most believe happened because of the Kurganization of Europe (the spread of the more patriarchal, hierarchical and war-like society from the eastern part of Europe that occurred around the time of the Chalcolithic).

Furthering the notion of Kurganization are the massive walls around the settlement. Why would you need walls if you're peace loving? The walls seem to have worked though as Los Millares dates from around 3200 BC and lasts until around 2300 BC. During this reign a number of other similar fortified settlements pop up across the Iberian peninsula, that many believe Los Millares began to dominate. These walled settlements like the ones at Cabrera de Mar near Barcelona. A lot of these settlements are in the south and along the eastern coast of Spain. There are two basic thoughts to these walled settlements popping up during the heyday of Los Millares. Either, they built these walls because they were a part of some regional group presumably dominated by the larger Los Millares or, they built the walls because the Los Millares were freaking bullies, using their huge 1000 people population to amass huge raiding forces for the day. Either way, Los Millares seems to have influenced southern and eastern Spain in a huge way.

But, it also had an impact on the rest of the peninsula as another famous Chalcolithic site, the Vila Nova de São Pedro in Portugal displays striking similarities to Los Millares. This is a distance of roughly 900 km. But, that pales in comparison to the similarities between Los Millares and Monte d'Accoddi which are, by way of mapquest, an astounding 1736 km apart. Of course this distance is made all the more difficult by the fact that Monte d'Accoddi is on the island of Sardinia and so the architects inspired by Los Millares would have had to cross the Mediterranean to take the ideas back home with them. And my guess is that the mapquest route back then didn't entail a safe little ferry ride from Marseille.

In this artist rendition of Los Millares you can see the three sets of fortification. At the very top there is a ring of stone protecting the most important people of the settlement (presumably). The middle section would have then housed most of the inhabitants. The outer wall would have initially been a buffer space but as the settlement grew later houses were built in this area. You can see the little cup like things in this drawing. These are the bastions that probably served as lookout points or areas from which they could defend the settlement from.

The Wonderful World of Megaliths

The Megalithic cultures of Europe (and elsewhere) decided that they, in their spare time would move massive rocks into a wonderful array of shapes and orders. Here is a quick overview of the various structures that these prehistoric peoples put up.

Dolmen

One of the most popular was a dolmen. A dolmen is a tomb that consists of a number of large rocks supporting a top table rock. They are found all over Europe. There are a number of great examples of Dolmens on the West Coast of Ireland, like the one pictured to the left.

Taula

A Taula is another table top structure similar to the dolmen. In fact the word Taula is table in Catalan. The Taulas are peculiar to the Talaiotic Culture that existed on the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain.

Newgrange in Ireland

Another popular megalithic structure was a passage grave. These burial chambers were often positioned so that the entrance would receive direct sunlight on important dates, like the sunrise of the winter solstice or the sunset of the equinox.

Cairn

Cairns are stacks of rocks that are found all over Europe. Sometimes they were used as decorations around other megalithic structures. Other times though they had a functional purpose as well. In England and Ireland they were strategically placed near forts to make conquering it that much more difficult. In Scandinavia they were put along the coast so that people could see them from the sea as guide posts. In Iceland, like the one pictured, they were basically prehistoric road markers.

Grand Menhir Brisé

A menhir is a single standing stone. In the Northwest of France alone there are over 1200 menhirs, with  Brittany having some of the most fascinating menhirs on earth. At the village of Locmariaquer in Brittany once stood the Grand Menhir Brisé or Great Broken Menhir. It was put up sometime around 4700 BC to decorate the Table des Marchand (Merchant's Table) passage grave. When it was erected it stood over 67 feet high and weighed over 280 tonnes. If that wasn't impressive enough, the stone was quarried and carried to the spot from a few kilometers away. Somehow though the menhir came crashing to earth around 4000 BC and broke into four pieces. Some archeologists think that it was deliberately pulled down, while others think that its tumble was caused by an earthquake.

Swedish Stone Ship

There was also the construction of a stone ship. Basically a stone ship was a group of menhirs arranged in a way that it looks like the outline of a ship. These types of structures were mainly found in Scandinavian countries, Germany and the Baltic States. The ships varied from only a few meters to massive like the Jelling Stone ship in Denmark which is over 1100 feet long. The Jelling Stone Ship is interesting because it combines a number of eras of construction. The mound and ship were originally a bronze age burial, but King Harald Bluetooth extended it and built two giant burial mounds in it for his mom and dad. The pictures of this from an ariel shot are fairly interesting and you can check them out here. Pictured to the right is a stone ship that gives a much clearer representation of what we're talking about. This stone ship is the largest in Sweden and dates to around 200 AD.

There a whole host of other megalithic structures like the tumuli or kurgans (large burial mounds), cromlechs (a burial site that looks a lot like dolmens combined with a stone circle that is Welsh in origin), stone rows (rows of single stones in straight order) and of course, the stone circle. The most famous of stone circles is Stonehenge and we'll save that for its own post.

Sesklo - The First Neolithic Culture of Europe

The Sesklo Culture is famous for being one of the first Neolithic cultures in Europe. If you remember, a culture becomes a Neolithic one when it discovers how to do one of two things or both. It leaves the Mesolithic to join the the Neolithic when it masters farming or starts building pottery. The Sesklo seem to have done this as early as 6850 BC give or take a margin of error. They did this in what is modern day Greece in the regions of Thessaly and Macedonia. Confusingly, the culture seems to arisen out of two cultures, the Pre-Sesklo and Proto-Sesklo cultures. The distinction is so ridiculously nuanced that I can't seem to wrap my head around it, let alone explain it. But, that's where they come from.

They became Neolithic by learning how to farm wheat and barley. Because Nabisco's Wheat Thins and barley laden Rye Whiskey cannot sustain a man (trust me on this one), the Sesklo culture also kept herds of sheep, goats and a few cows and pigs. They completed the double Neolithic by fashioning bowls and cups to eat and drink out of. The Rye Whiskey though they liked to drink straight from the bottle like a boss.

The Sesklo would have been a minor footnote in history had they not influenced other cultures though. In this they seem to have been prolific. They influenced the Karanovo and the Starčevo–Kőrös–Criş in the Balkans. The Starčevo–Kőrös–Criş would then go on to influence the Danubian cultures that stretched all over Southeastern and Central Europe. The Sesklo also seem to have been the origin for the Cardium pottery Culture that dotted the southern coastal region of much of Europe stretching from Croatia to Italy to France and to Spain. For this reason, the minor city of Sesklo, played a major role in spreading the Neolithic Revolution to much of Europe.