Visitors to the exhibition «Loulé: Territories, Memories, Identities», which is being mounted at the National Archeology Museum, in Lisbon, will have the opportunity to see pieces from the Cerro do Castelo de Corte João Marques, witnessing the lives of our ancestors prehistoric, and which will now be exposed for the first time.
Victor S. Gonçalves, scientific commissioner of the exhibition's Pre-History Nucleus, gives a glimpse of what can be expected in this nucleus, which involves the exploration of a territory that is three - the Serra, the Barrocal and the Litoral - and of the its inhabitants, who lived there between 6000 and 2000 before our Era.
The vast majority of these archaeological sites have never been excavated, with the exception of one, which is critical. “The Cerro do Castelo de Corte João Marques was excavated in the 1978th century, in 1979/XNUMX”, he recalls.
“The materials from this site belonged to a village of copper metallurgists. It is one of the few existing sites in Portugal where there are all phases of metallurgy. That is, there is copper ore, there are pieces of copper smelting, there are furnaces to smelt copper… and then, of course, materials, artefacts that have become part of a local or broader trade network, covering southern Portugal. Therefore, it is a site for miners and at the same time for metal ore transformers, a site of enormous importance”, explains Victor S. Gonçalves.
For reasons of preservation, the Cerro do Castelo de Corte João Marques, in which there is now the intention to dig again, is not to be visited. Therefore, the exhibition in preparation at the National Archeology Museum will be a unique opportunity to discover pieces from this site, which will be exhibited for the first time. But there are other surprises at the core of Prehistory.
“There is also a large, extensively engraved menhir that was purposely brought from the Municipal Museum of Loulé for this exhibition and which will be accompanied by a set of photographs taken using state-of-the-art digital systems, including three-dimensional ones, which allow us to see engravings that are not immediately visible. to the naked eye. Some of these engravings, such as the suns, are a representation that we also find on the shale slabs that were hung around the neck of the dead, between 3200 and 2500 before our Era – and in the exhibition we will have an exceptional example”, adds the scientific commissioner from the core.
“We will also have a cheese factory similar to others identified in the Lisbon region, in the current municipality of Mafra, and which were analyzed by a laboratory with which we made a protocol and found traces of milk fat inside the holes, which proves that it was that is its use”.
Also in this nucleus, an extraordinary piece of pottery will be on display, the Retorta jar, in Boliqueime, whose precise collection conditions are unknown. Victor S. Gonçalves says that this jug also appeared by chance: “there was a well-known priest, Padre Semedo de Azevedo, who was a great collector of antiques, and the parishioners used to take him some. This time, he was in a Roman necropolis, with Roman graves everywhere, when he saw a piece of clay coming out of the earth. He decided to dig around it, and when he finally managed to unearth it, it was an entire Neolithic vessel. It is the oldest piece that we are going to present at the exhibition”.
The exhibition «Loulé. Territories, Memories, Identities» is a joint initiative of the National Museums of Archeology and the Municipal Museum of Loulé, which brings together more than 500 cultural assets that testify to the last eight millennia of history in this which is the largest and most populated municipality in the Algarve.
Commissioned by Victor S. Gonçalves, Catarina Viegas and Amílcar Guerra, from the University of Lisbon, Helena Catarino, from the University of Coimbra and Luís Filipe Oliveira, from the University of Algarve, the exhibition reveals the human occupation of Loulé's territory from Prehistory to Middle Ages.
The opening date for the exhibition will be announced at the end of next week.
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